June 1, 2011 • 17 mins
When a mysterious woman sporting a turban showed up in England, people took her for a foreign beggar. But she claimed to be a princess who had been kidnapped by pirates! Eventually, however, the truth proved stranger than fiction. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sair Dowdy and I'm w chuckerboarding and suns. During
this podcast, I've really come to love talking about some
of the sketchier figures in history. And it took me
(00:22):
a while to get there. Remember the old Marie Laveaux
episode and the Mad Trapper episode. They really frustrated me,
just because they're so obscure and you can't tell what's true.
And Marie Levo, I mean, there might have been more
than one Murray Levo. It's it can be kind of
frustrating when you first get into it. But by the
time I got to like the Emperor Norton episode or
(00:43):
spring Heeled Jack last fall, I was pretty sold on
the idea of these sketchy historical figures because sometimes it's
really just as interesting to learn about the life someone
invents than the life that they really lead. Yeah, but well,
today it may be pretty easy to self invent through
the Internet and new media. For example, it was kind
(01:03):
of tricky in the early eighteen hundreds in rural England.
You were probably really limited in where you could go
for one thing, who you could meet also, and what
you could do, Yeah, especially if you were a young
poor woman like Mary Wilcox, who were going to be
talking about today. She ran away from home, she worked
a bunch of odd jobs, she got fired, she had
(01:23):
a fowling hospital baby who died, She took to begging,
and it all seems like a pretty dismal life path
until Holy Thursday or Good Friday, depending on what account
you read, in eighteen seventeen, when she wandered into the
village of Almondsbury and became a princess. Of course at
the time, and nobody recognized her as Mary Wilcox. She
(01:46):
was just a semi exotic looking young woman with long
dark hair, brown eyes, and very white teeth, and a
turban kind of set her apart. Yeah, it kind of
made her stand out a little bit in this village
outside of Bristol. And she was also where in a
plain black dress and carrying all her belongings in one bundle,
and she seemed to be starving and distress kind of
(02:06):
worse for aware. But what really made her stick out
like a sore thumb is that she was speaking a
language no one could understand. Yeah, so that confused the
locals and and they were thinking, okay, well, maybe she's
just your standard foreign beggar, you know, some country that
might be well known. Somebody in town might speak the language.
So they took her to the porthouse, and no one
(02:27):
there could understand her either, So she was taken to
the county magistrate's house Samuel Warrell, who was also known
as Devil Wharrel, who had a Greek Man servant who
was fluent in a few different languages, but nobody there
could understand her either, And Devil Wharrel was kind of skeptical.
In the first place. He thought she might just be
a beggar who had a really elaborate hoax, and asked
(02:50):
for any paper she had. She didn't have any. She
just had a few a few small coins, including a
counterfeit coin. That right was a big no no. But
that was one thing that made them start thinking she
might have been the real deal, because she didn't seem
at all concerned by the fact that she had a
counterfeit coin. It didn't seem to be a significant problem
(03:11):
to her. So well, Devil Wahrel was a little bit skeptical.
His American born wife Elizabeth was pretty enchanted by this
young woman. It was it was kind of an exotic
addition to this sleepy town. Yeah, so they put her up,
this mystery woman. They put her up in a in
the village's public house. And it's here where the first
clue of her origin or so called origin emerged. She
(03:33):
saw a print of a pineapple on the wall and
got really excited, and she identified it as a nanna.
So she's from some tropical locale. People are thinking now
she recognizes a pineapple and is calling it by name,
symbol of home. And that night at the lodging house
she acted even stranger. She didn't eat, but she drank
(03:53):
tea and performed a prayer over every cup. She didn't
seem to recognize the purpose of a bed either. Yeah,
I think a landlady's daughter had to demonstrate to her. Look,
how comfortable the bed is. You can sleep here instead
of on the floor. But the next day Mrs Whirl
comes by the lodging house, picks her up, brings her
back to Knowl Park, which is the estate where they live,
(04:14):
and started to investigate the girl's origins by going through
books that the couple owned and and the mystery woman
seemed especially drawn to pictures of China in books, and
also to the Chinese furniture and little Chinese knickknacks that
the world's had in their home, so it seemed like
maybe she had some kind of Asian connection. She also
(04:35):
identified herself as Cariboo, so we have a name now too,
to to put on this mystery woman. But she was
still behaving really strangely, and she wasn't really eating, and
nobody could understand her. So after a few days she
was finally presented to the Portuguese sailor Manuel and Nestso
and this was really the first big break in in
(04:58):
who this woman might be. Yeah, he said he could
understand her language, and he told the following story. Her
name is Cariboo, and she's a princess from an island
called Java Sioux in the East Indies. She's she'd been
stolen by pirates and had escaped to the Bristol Channel. Okay,
so the worlds are pretty impressed by that story. That
sounds incredibly romantic, and were of course right in the
(05:21):
thick of the romantic era right now too, so so
they were into it. They invited friends over. They wanted
people to to see this woman and educated friends to
who might build a piece together more information about her background.
So Cariboo spent the summer at Noel Park entertaining her host,
and she really seems to have had a pretty good time.
(05:41):
And when we discussed the real woman's actual background, some
of this is gonna add up a little bit. But
she was very good at fencing and at archery. She
made her own bow and arrow. Actually, she would dance
and carry around a gong which she would play. Sometimes.
She'd also pray from the tree tops. She also swam
naked in the lake and cooked a chicken curry, So
(06:03):
good stuff for a guest to do. Multitalented, and she
also met with the world's learned guests who extracted even
more of her story from her and had her copy
out examples of her writing. And finally, a doctor Wilkinson
from Bath even examined her head and found that there
were strange incisions there that could only have been the
work of Oriental surgeons, is how he put it. He
(06:24):
also helped identify her language as ray Jane from Sumatra. Yeah,
so word of this exotic princess obviously got out there.
All these guests coming over and the world's certainly are
trying to promote this woman staying with them. And so
when the news finally makes it into the national papers,
they hear from somebody and it's it's not good news.
(06:47):
It's not somebody confirming her story. It's a Mrs Neil
from Bristol who said she knows exactly who this Princess
Cariboo is. She's Mary Wilcox, who is the daughter of
a cobbler from the village of Witherage. And Mrs Neil
says that the woman has stayed in her lodging house
before and would even entertain her with this made up
(07:09):
gibberish language, and whenever she would leave the house she'd
go out on the turban. So it seems pretty likely
it's the same lady. Yeah, and Cariboo finally confessed, yes,
it is true. The news went crazy over this confession.
They were actually kind of impressed by the fact that
it was such an elaborate fraud and an embarrassment for
the middle class. Yeah, it was kind of. It put
(07:29):
the whorls in a bad place, and all of these
so called experts who had been chatting away with with
Princess Cariboo and trying to decipher her culture. But now
that we know she's really Mary Wilcox, what's this lady's story?
Why did she start this elaborate ruse in the first place,
and where did she pick up the skills that that
made it so convincing. I think if I was trying
(07:50):
to pretend to speak a foreign language, I wouldn't be
able to do it for more than an hour or so.
Or pretend not to understand English, I think that would
be would be even dr So. Mary Wilcox was baptized
November twenty three see right in England. According to her
father about of rheumatic fever had left her a little
(08:11):
off in the head from a from a pretty young age. Yeah,
but she had been an active kid. She worked, she
was kind of a tomboy and at nineteen she ended
up leaving home. By the time she got to London,
she was actually really sick and had a fire cupping
therapy done at a poorhouse hospital and that's where those
weird scars that Dr Wilkinson had found came from. She
(08:32):
picked up some knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish customs when
she worked as a nursemaid for a family who lived
next door to a Jewish household, And she also used
that opportunity to practice storytelling to the kids. So that's
kind of where she picked up some of her skills
in that department. Yeah, and and from there she lived
her a time at a Magdalene hospital for reformed women,
so a prostitutes home or reform prostitutes home. But she
(08:54):
was kicked out when it was discovered that she hadn't
in fact been a prostitute. I read in our view
of one of the more recent books on Princess Carabell
a lot of the information comes from an old narrative
by John Matthew Gooch, but in a newer accounts it's
just said, well, somebody who lied this much. Maybe we
shouldn't entirely believe some of these details about her life.
(09:18):
Maybe she was kicked out of the Magdalene home for
for other reasons, not because she she was too too
pure to be living there. Yes, well, regardless of what
happened there, we know that after that she may have
spent some time in France, and by February eighteen sixteen,
she had had a baby, which was identified first with
as the child of Exeter Bricklayer John Edward Baker and
(09:39):
later as the child of a Frenchman that she had
supposedly met in a book shop, So another really sketchy
up in the air detail. But by late in the year,
the baby head unfortunately died at the Faumiling hospital and
Mary ultimately ended up back in Devon, where she told
her parents that she was off to Philadelphia. Yeah, she
took her time getting to Bristol, though, which is where
she would have failed to a America, And she was
(10:01):
begging along the way and just sort of just sort
of working her way up the road, begging and hanging
out with gypsies too, which is certainly where she picked
up some of her modes of dress and some of
her customs that were so convincing to to the people
she ended up with. But finally in Bristol, she decided
she'd get her ticket to Philadelphia, and she set about
(10:24):
raising the money she needed for the passage. But she
noticed while she was begging and trying to raise the
money that the Breton girls, who were also begging in
their traditional lace head dresses, were doing a lot better
and they were getting a lot more money, and she
decided that she wanted to to figure out a way
to put herself apart too, So she designed a turban
(10:45):
something Mrs Neil later remembered and pretended to be French,
and again with the lying she would sort of change
her identity if she ran into somebody who actually spoke French,
then she would be Spanish, and and vice versa. Just
sort of her game the best she could and eventually
making her way up to Almondsbury where she has her
(11:06):
dramatic evolution into Princess Cariboo. So ultimately, the key to
her success seemed to be the fact that she actually
knew a few languages and she could understand, speak and
imitate them, and also her ability to convincingly not understand
English at all. Yeah, that ability to feign ignorance of
her native language really did help, because after experts started
(11:30):
hanging around and they honestly believed that she could not
understand them, they would would discuss things they had seen
and quiz her, and she could pick up on what
they were saying and the books that they were showing
her and sort of do what was expected of her,
follow the customs that they thought a princess from this
(11:51):
part of the world might actually do. So really good
memory came into play there too. Yeah, she she definitely
had a good memory. But after her discovery, after her outing,
Mrs Worrell did spring for a ticket to America. Mrs
Worrell seems like a pretty nice lace. I know, that's
really generous. And when she got there, Mary was met
by crowds at the dock, but her attempt to perform
(12:11):
as Princess Cariboo with a showman actually didn't go so well,
so she ended up coming back to London in eighteen
twenty four to try the same exact act, but also
with very little success. I mean, I'd guess the Princess
Cariboo if she was still doing her archery and her
gong dances and stuff. I don't know. Maybe maybe the
show just wasn't as impressive as the real deal. But
(12:33):
by eight she was back in Bristol and married. And
so what is this former princess, this impostor going to
do with the next thirty years of her life if
she can't tour as Princess Cariboo get into the leech business. Yeah,
she sold leeches to the Bristol infirmary and was pretty
good at it too. She was really successful and then
(12:55):
she had her new little family, tried to play down
her whole Princess Cariboo pass and lived a long, happy
life until eighteen sixty four. Yeah, and I'm a little
curious about what selling leeches really entails in the first place.
I'm going to have to do some more research on that,
because well, I don't know, or maybe not. It's kind
of gross. And I know, when I think about it carefully,
(13:17):
maybe you could just ask someone to write in about
the leech business. Maybe if you have persand knowledge of
the leach selling business, let us know it and let
us know how, because we're really curious to know why.
You know that? Definitely, Um, But I mean, I think
this is an interesting story again, these these sort of
sketchy people who reinvent their lives, or it's just interesting
(13:40):
to weigh the combination of factors that are probably involved,
possibly a little mental illness or as her father said,
some kind of effects from her rheumatic fever. As a youth,
she seemed way too smart. She did seem really smart,
and and I had a lot of initiative to to
sort of make herself into into something she couldn't be.
(14:01):
But of course she also seems like a convulsive liar,
and there's a huge element of fraud and in betrayal
behind it because she she did betray people who were
quite kind to her. Um, it's just there's so much
going on. I think it's it's a strange story. I've
never seen the movie. I think I might have to.
I haven't seen it either, look it up now. I
(14:22):
vaguely remember the title kind of fascinating me as a
little kid because it had a princess with a crown
on the cover in the movie story. Now, do you
ever have like the covers that you can remember? Yeah,
I do, but I usually watched the movies. Yeah, I
never saw the movie. But um, maybe someday you could
also let us know if it's actually worth my renting it. Yeah,
(14:45):
So you can write to us or at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com, or you can look
us up on Twitter at myston history or on Facebook. Yeah,
and that brings us to a listener mail. So this
seme is from Dave, and I thought it was completely
appropriate for this podcast because it's about a made up language.
(15:06):
If only only Princess Caribou had convinced a whole bunch
of other people to speak her language. She might have
had a case here, but Dave wrote in high Ladies,
I absolutely love the podcast. I've been a listener for years,
but first time emailer. Have you ever considered doing an
episode on Esperanto. It's a quote constructed language created in
(15:27):
seven by a Polish man named L. L. Zamenhoff, with
an incredible history. Meant is a culture neutral international language.
It's the only such language that actually gained a lasting
following which still exists today. Esperantos were targets of the
Nazis and Soviets, and many were killed in World War Two.
Salmenhoff was Jewish. It has a very rich literature, including
(15:49):
many many books originally written in Esperanto. Both the life
of Zamenhoff and the resulting Esperanto movement is just endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately,
and it is mentioned in the media, it is usually
dismissed as somehow like culling on. So this is this
is pretty interesting. I'm I'm curious to look into it.
(16:10):
I just learned one of our coworkers knows a little
bit about Espronto, so we might have to consult with him. Yeah,
and find out a little bit more about it. I
disagree with you, though. I don't think Princess Cariboo would
be into this too many people, too many people. Yeah,
she was. She was concerned about her true identity being exposed.
I don't know if she wanted to followers. Yeah, she
would have wanted something. I think that nobody else could
(16:31):
catch on too. She was a little bit of a
fibber so and speaking of FIBs, we have an article
on our website called how lying Works, So if you
want to dissect that topic a little more and find
out maybe how Princess Cariboo was able to use it
to advantage, you can look it up on our homepage
at www dot how Stuff works dot com. Be sure
(16:55):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstaffords iPhone app
has a ride. Download it today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sair Dowdy and I'm w chuckerboarding and suns. During
this podcast, I've really come to love talking about some
of the sketchier figures in history. And it took me
(00:22):
a while to get there. Remember the old Marie Laveaux
episode and the Mad Trapper episode. They really frustrated me,
just because they're so obscure and you can't tell what's true.
And Marie Levo, I mean, there might have been more
than one Murray Levo. It's it can be kind of
frustrating when you first get into it. But by the
time I got to like the Emperor Norton episode or
(00:43):
spring Heeled Jack last fall, I was pretty sold on
the idea of these sketchy historical figures because sometimes it's
really just as interesting to learn about the life someone
invents than the life that they really lead. Yeah, but well,
today it may be pretty easy to self invent through
the Internet and new media. For example, it was kind
(01:03):
of tricky in the early eighteen hundreds in rural England.
You were probably really limited in where you could go
for one thing, who you could meet also, and what
you could do, Yeah, especially if you were a young
poor woman like Mary Wilcox, who were going to be
talking about today. She ran away from home, she worked
a bunch of odd jobs, she got fired, she had
(01:23):
a fowling hospital baby who died, She took to begging,
and it all seems like a pretty dismal life path
until Holy Thursday or Good Friday, depending on what account
you read, in eighteen seventeen, when she wandered into the
village of Almondsbury and became a princess. Of course at
the time, and nobody recognized her as Mary Wilcox. She
(01:46):
was just a semi exotic looking young woman with long
dark hair, brown eyes, and very white teeth, and a
turban kind of set her apart. Yeah, it kind of
made her stand out a little bit in this village
outside of Bristol. And she was also where in a
plain black dress and carrying all her belongings in one bundle,
and she seemed to be starving and distress kind of
(02:06):
worse for aware. But what really made her stick out
like a sore thumb is that she was speaking a
language no one could understand. Yeah, so that confused the
locals and and they were thinking, okay, well, maybe she's
just your standard foreign beggar, you know, some country that
might be well known. Somebody in town might speak the language.
So they took her to the porthouse, and no one
(02:27):
there could understand her either, So she was taken to
the county magistrate's house Samuel Warrell, who was also known
as Devil Wharrel, who had a Greek Man servant who
was fluent in a few different languages, but nobody there
could understand her either, And Devil Wharrel was kind of skeptical.
In the first place. He thought she might just be
a beggar who had a really elaborate hoax, and asked
(02:50):
for any paper she had. She didn't have any. She
just had a few a few small coins, including a
counterfeit coin. That right was a big no no. But
that was one thing that made them start thinking she
might have been the real deal, because she didn't seem
at all concerned by the fact that she had a
counterfeit coin. It didn't seem to be a significant problem
(03:11):
to her. So well, Devil Wahrel was a little bit skeptical.
His American born wife Elizabeth was pretty enchanted by this
young woman. It was it was kind of an exotic
addition to this sleepy town. Yeah, so they put her up,
this mystery woman. They put her up in a in
the village's public house. And it's here where the first
clue of her origin or so called origin emerged. She
(03:33):
saw a print of a pineapple on the wall and
got really excited, and she identified it as a nanna.
So she's from some tropical locale. People are thinking now
she recognizes a pineapple and is calling it by name,
symbol of home. And that night at the lodging house
she acted even stranger. She didn't eat, but she drank
(03:53):
tea and performed a prayer over every cup. She didn't
seem to recognize the purpose of a bed either. Yeah,
I think a landlady's daughter had to demonstrate to her. Look,
how comfortable the bed is. You can sleep here instead
of on the floor. But the next day Mrs Whirl
comes by the lodging house, picks her up, brings her
back to Knowl Park, which is the estate where they live,
(04:14):
and started to investigate the girl's origins by going through
books that the couple owned and and the mystery woman
seemed especially drawn to pictures of China in books, and
also to the Chinese furniture and little Chinese knickknacks that
the world's had in their home, so it seemed like
maybe she had some kind of Asian connection. She also
(04:35):
identified herself as Cariboo, so we have a name now too,
to to put on this mystery woman. But she was
still behaving really strangely, and she wasn't really eating, and
nobody could understand her. So after a few days she
was finally presented to the Portuguese sailor Manuel and Nestso
and this was really the first big break in in
(04:58):
who this woman might be. Yeah, he said he could
understand her language, and he told the following story. Her
name is Cariboo, and she's a princess from an island
called Java Sioux in the East Indies. She's she'd been
stolen by pirates and had escaped to the Bristol Channel. Okay,
so the worlds are pretty impressed by that story. That
sounds incredibly romantic, and were of course right in the
(05:21):
thick of the romantic era right now too, so so
they were into it. They invited friends over. They wanted
people to to see this woman and educated friends to
who might build a piece together more information about her background.
So Cariboo spent the summer at Noel Park entertaining her host,
and she really seems to have had a pretty good time.
(05:41):
And when we discussed the real woman's actual background, some
of this is gonna add up a little bit. But
she was very good at fencing and at archery. She
made her own bow and arrow. Actually, she would dance
and carry around a gong which she would play. Sometimes.
She'd also pray from the tree tops. She also swam
naked in the lake and cooked a chicken curry, So
(06:03):
good stuff for a guest to do. Multitalented, and she
also met with the world's learned guests who extracted even
more of her story from her and had her copy
out examples of her writing. And finally, a doctor Wilkinson
from Bath even examined her head and found that there
were strange incisions there that could only have been the
work of Oriental surgeons, is how he put it. He
(06:24):
also helped identify her language as ray Jane from Sumatra. Yeah,
so word of this exotic princess obviously got out there.
All these guests coming over and the world's certainly are
trying to promote this woman staying with them. And so
when the news finally makes it into the national papers,
they hear from somebody and it's it's not good news.
(06:47):
It's not somebody confirming her story. It's a Mrs Neil
from Bristol who said she knows exactly who this Princess
Cariboo is. She's Mary Wilcox, who is the daughter of
a cobbler from the village of Witherage. And Mrs Neil
says that the woman has stayed in her lodging house
before and would even entertain her with this made up
(07:09):
gibberish language, and whenever she would leave the house she'd
go out on the turban. So it seems pretty likely
it's the same lady. Yeah, and Cariboo finally confessed, yes,
it is true. The news went crazy over this confession.
They were actually kind of impressed by the fact that
it was such an elaborate fraud and an embarrassment for
the middle class. Yeah, it was kind of. It put
(07:29):
the whorls in a bad place, and all of these
so called experts who had been chatting away with with
Princess Cariboo and trying to decipher her culture. But now
that we know she's really Mary Wilcox, what's this lady's story?
Why did she start this elaborate ruse in the first place,
and where did she pick up the skills that that
made it so convincing. I think if I was trying
(07:50):
to pretend to speak a foreign language, I wouldn't be
able to do it for more than an hour or so.
Or pretend not to understand English, I think that would
be would be even dr So. Mary Wilcox was baptized
November twenty three see right in England. According to her
father about of rheumatic fever had left her a little
(08:11):
off in the head from a from a pretty young age. Yeah,
but she had been an active kid. She worked, she
was kind of a tomboy and at nineteen she ended
up leaving home. By the time she got to London,
she was actually really sick and had a fire cupping
therapy done at a poorhouse hospital and that's where those
weird scars that Dr Wilkinson had found came from. She
(08:32):
picked up some knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish customs when
she worked as a nursemaid for a family who lived
next door to a Jewish household, And she also used
that opportunity to practice storytelling to the kids. So that's
kind of where she picked up some of her skills
in that department. Yeah, and and from there she lived
her a time at a Magdalene hospital for reformed women,
so a prostitutes home or reform prostitutes home. But she
(08:54):
was kicked out when it was discovered that she hadn't
in fact been a prostitute. I read in our view
of one of the more recent books on Princess Carabell
a lot of the information comes from an old narrative
by John Matthew Gooch, but in a newer accounts it's
just said, well, somebody who lied this much. Maybe we
shouldn't entirely believe some of these details about her life.
(09:18):
Maybe she was kicked out of the Magdalene home for
for other reasons, not because she she was too too
pure to be living there. Yes, well, regardless of what
happened there, we know that after that she may have
spent some time in France, and by February eighteen sixteen,
she had had a baby, which was identified first with
as the child of Exeter Bricklayer John Edward Baker and
(09:39):
later as the child of a Frenchman that she had
supposedly met in a book shop, So another really sketchy
up in the air detail. But by late in the year,
the baby head unfortunately died at the Faumiling hospital and
Mary ultimately ended up back in Devon, where she told
her parents that she was off to Philadelphia. Yeah, she
took her time getting to Bristol, though, which is where
she would have failed to a America, And she was
(10:01):
begging along the way and just sort of just sort
of working her way up the road, begging and hanging
out with gypsies too, which is certainly where she picked
up some of her modes of dress and some of
her customs that were so convincing to to the people
she ended up with. But finally in Bristol, she decided
she'd get her ticket to Philadelphia, and she set about
(10:24):
raising the money she needed for the passage. But she
noticed while she was begging and trying to raise the
money that the Breton girls, who were also begging in
their traditional lace head dresses, were doing a lot better
and they were getting a lot more money, and she
decided that she wanted to to figure out a way
to put herself apart too, So she designed a turban
(10:45):
something Mrs Neil later remembered and pretended to be French,
and again with the lying she would sort of change
her identity if she ran into somebody who actually spoke French,
then she would be Spanish, and and vice versa. Just
sort of her game the best she could and eventually
making her way up to Almondsbury where she has her
(11:06):
dramatic evolution into Princess Cariboo. So ultimately, the key to
her success seemed to be the fact that she actually
knew a few languages and she could understand, speak and
imitate them, and also her ability to convincingly not understand
English at all. Yeah, that ability to feign ignorance of
her native language really did help, because after experts started
(11:30):
hanging around and they honestly believed that she could not
understand them, they would would discuss things they had seen
and quiz her, and she could pick up on what
they were saying and the books that they were showing
her and sort of do what was expected of her,
follow the customs that they thought a princess from this
(11:51):
part of the world might actually do. So really good
memory came into play there too. Yeah, she she definitely
had a good memory. But after her discovery, after her outing,
Mrs Worrell did spring for a ticket to America. Mrs
Worrell seems like a pretty nice lace. I know, that's
really generous. And when she got there, Mary was met
by crowds at the dock, but her attempt to perform
(12:11):
as Princess Cariboo with a showman actually didn't go so well,
so she ended up coming back to London in eighteen
twenty four to try the same exact act, but also
with very little success. I mean, I'd guess the Princess
Cariboo if she was still doing her archery and her
gong dances and stuff. I don't know. Maybe maybe the
show just wasn't as impressive as the real deal. But
(12:33):
by eight she was back in Bristol and married. And
so what is this former princess, this impostor going to
do with the next thirty years of her life if
she can't tour as Princess Cariboo get into the leech business. Yeah,
she sold leeches to the Bristol infirmary and was pretty
good at it too. She was really successful and then
(12:55):
she had her new little family, tried to play down
her whole Princess Cariboo pass and lived a long, happy
life until eighteen sixty four. Yeah, and I'm a little
curious about what selling leeches really entails in the first place.
I'm going to have to do some more research on that,
because well, I don't know, or maybe not. It's kind
of gross. And I know, when I think about it carefully,
(13:17):
maybe you could just ask someone to write in about
the leech business. Maybe if you have persand knowledge of
the leach selling business, let us know it and let
us know how, because we're really curious to know why.
You know that? Definitely, Um, But I mean, I think
this is an interesting story again, these these sort of
sketchy people who reinvent their lives, or it's just interesting
(13:40):
to weigh the combination of factors that are probably involved,
possibly a little mental illness or as her father said,
some kind of effects from her rheumatic fever. As a youth,
she seemed way too smart. She did seem really smart,
and and I had a lot of initiative to to
sort of make herself into into something she couldn't be.
(14:01):
But of course she also seems like a convulsive liar,
and there's a huge element of fraud and in betrayal
behind it because she she did betray people who were
quite kind to her. Um, it's just there's so much
going on. I think it's it's a strange story. I've
never seen the movie. I think I might have to.
I haven't seen it either, look it up now. I
(14:22):
vaguely remember the title kind of fascinating me as a
little kid because it had a princess with a crown
on the cover in the movie story. Now, do you
ever have like the covers that you can remember? Yeah,
I do, but I usually watched the movies. Yeah, I
never saw the movie. But um, maybe someday you could
also let us know if it's actually worth my renting it. Yeah,
(14:45):
So you can write to us or at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com, or you can look
us up on Twitter at myston history or on Facebook. Yeah,
and that brings us to a listener mail. So this
seme is from Dave, and I thought it was completely
appropriate for this podcast because it's about a made up language.
(15:06):
If only only Princess Caribou had convinced a whole bunch
of other people to speak her language. She might have
had a case here, but Dave wrote in high Ladies,
I absolutely love the podcast. I've been a listener for years,
but first time emailer. Have you ever considered doing an
episode on Esperanto. It's a quote constructed language created in
(15:27):
seven by a Polish man named L. L. Zamenhoff, with
an incredible history. Meant is a culture neutral international language.
It's the only such language that actually gained a lasting
following which still exists today. Esperantos were targets of the
Nazis and Soviets, and many were killed in World War Two.
Salmenhoff was Jewish. It has a very rich literature, including
(15:49):
many many books originally written in Esperanto. Both the life
of Zamenhoff and the resulting Esperanto movement is just endlessly fascinating. Unfortunately,
and it is mentioned in the media, it is usually
dismissed as somehow like culling on. So this is this
is pretty interesting. I'm I'm curious to look into it.
(16:10):
I just learned one of our coworkers knows a little
bit about Espronto, so we might have to consult with him. Yeah,
and find out a little bit more about it. I
disagree with you, though. I don't think Princess Cariboo would
be into this too many people, too many people. Yeah,
she was. She was concerned about her true identity being exposed.
I don't know if she wanted to followers. Yeah, she
would have wanted something. I think that nobody else could
(16:31):
catch on too. She was a little bit of a
fibber so and speaking of FIBs, we have an article
on our website called how lying Works, So if you
want to dissect that topic a little more and find
out maybe how Princess Cariboo was able to use it
to advantage, you can look it up on our homepage
at www dot how Stuff works dot com. Be sure
(16:55):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The Houstaffords iPhone app
has a ride. Download it today on iTunes
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