April 20, 2021 • 29 mins
Mary Baker adopted a disguise that she hoped would make her more interesting to those she considered commoners. She became Princess Caraboo, a fictional royal pretending to come from the far far away island of Javasu.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
third season of Criminalia. Our first season was all about
women poisoners, and our second season was all about stalkers.
(00:23):
But this season we're exploring the lives and motivations of
some of the most notorious impostors throughout history. I'm Maria
T Marqi and I'm Holly Fry. Marian, I'm so excited
to be here with you for season three. Oh, it's
gonna be great. As we did in our first two seasons,
we planned to look at some of history's transgressions and
(00:43):
get a better understanding of what really went down. So
we're gonna take a look at how these crimes might
be seen through today's eyes. As we always say, a
little distance goes a long way. We do always say that.
So today we're going to talk about a woman who
pretended to be royalty from a far away island. But
first we have to talk about what makes an impostor.
(01:06):
Just to set this whole season up, impostors are people
who pretend to be someone else for their own game.
Often that's financial gain, but it's not unheard of for
an impostor to be dishonest to improve their social status
or social gain. Some make up a new identity, or
they steal your identity. Some impostors do it in order
(01:27):
to circumvent on just rules we're going to talk this
season about, you know, women who dressed like men in
order to fight in wars or to go to school.
And some are simply criminals looking for an easy way
to evade capture. So in today's world, impostors might impersonate
people in organizations that you would ordinarily trust. When someone
(01:48):
feigning to be the I r S Calls about an
unpaid bill, you would be inclined to assume that's the
real deal. They might also pretend to be someone that
you know, and they may pretend to work for play
pass such as the Social Security Administration or even your
local electric company. No matter who they pretend to work for, though,
their main goal is usually to get you to pay
(02:10):
them or to get enough of your personal information so
that they can pay themselves at your expense, and they
will try anyway they can to get that info. Modern
imposter scams often begin with an unsolicited phone call, email, text,
or even social media message, and our technology allows people
(02:31):
to use techniques like social engineering, which would be fishing
for confidential or personal information that they might use for
fraudulent purposes against you. You can also meet many of
today's impostors on dating sites or like we said, social media,
where they can have easily created fake profiles. We even
(02:53):
have the term cat fishing for this behavior. So it's
super common even with our technology, though it's the same
destination at always has been no matter what the story.
Many impostors are in it for money, and they will
eventually ask you to transfer funds to them, usually for
a reason that sounds pretty plausible and in jail. Right.
(03:15):
So all of that explained, let's finally set our scenes.
So our first impostor is a woman who was born
Mary Wilcox in sevente or two. Anyway, she was born
to a poor family living in Devon, England, and as
she became an adult, she adopted a disguise that she
(03:35):
hoped would make her more interesting to those she considered commoners.
So she became Princess Caribou, a fictional royal who pretended
to come from the far far away island of Java Suit.
Java Suit she claimed was located in the Indian Ocean. Okay,
it's a little bit early, but we're going to take
a break here for a word from our sponsors so
(03:57):
that we can keep the narrative of this impostors got
eyes altogether, and we're going to talk about the woman
who fooled a whole village into thinking she was royalty.
After this, welcome back to Criminalia. Let's meet the woman
(04:18):
who called herself Princess Caribou. One day in the spring
of eighteen seventeen, a woman in her mid twenties appeared
in the town of Almondsbury, near Bristol, speaking a never
heard before language, not a word of English. She wore
unusual clothing and a black turban on her head, and
(04:38):
she carried a small bundle with her that contained a
few necessities, so a few halfpennies and a counterfeit sixpence.
When she first encountered a resident of the village, it
was the cobbler, and he initially assumed she must be
a foreign peasant or some sort of beggar. The cobbler
and his wife took her to a man named Mr Overton,
(05:00):
who was the overseer of the local poorhouse. And if
you're not familiar with a poorhouse. It was a government
run facility that was used to house poor people in
a time before social services existed, But it wasn't as
benevolent as it may sound. The reality was that poor
houses were places of involuntary servitude. Upon seeing the person
(05:24):
that they would come to know as Princess Cariboo, Overton was,
as others in the town, mystified by her language and
how she dressed, and so he decided to take her
to the home of a man named Samuel Warrell, who
was the town clerk of Bristol and a magistrate. Samuel
Warrell and his wife Elizabeth, actually took this woman into
their home in Noll Park, and there the person we
(05:46):
know is Mary convinced Elizabeth that she was a lost
princess from the East Indies, which was what they would
have called it at the time. How she did this
we don't know. We're presuming a lot of hand gestures
and pointing at maps as sumed that she was homeless
and with a counterfeit coin in her pocket. A family
such as the Worlds, they were high standing family in
(06:08):
the town. It really couldn't provide accommodations to a woman
who actually might be a criminal. They didn't know it
would look poorly among their peers, though she had made
quite an impression on them. Elizabeth arranged for a room
for the woman she believed to be a foreign visitor
at a local inn called as far as we can figure,
I love this the Bowl. My new retirement goal is
(06:32):
to start an in and call it the Bowl, and
it'll just be our little in. Joe can let me
feel this. Although the worlds were still pretty unsure one
way or the other about Mary or Princess Cariboo and
who exactly this was, it was decided that she was
a beggar and should be taken to Bristol and tried
for vagrancy. And as an asside, we are not actually
(06:52):
sure who made this decision. It could have been the authorities,
or it could have been the very busy and involved
villagers of all Insburg. This decision was made to take
her to Bristol to be examined both by John Haythorne,
who was the mayor of Bristol, and then at St.
Peter's Hospital, which was a facility that cared for the
poor and her vagrance. But after causing many problems, and
(07:17):
we can only speculate on thoset problems because there doesn't
seem to be a record of her time spent at
the facility record in detail, she was actually returned to
the world's home. So, as you can imagine, by this
point everyone knew about this eccentric foreign stranger, and despite
any of those earlier suspicions, the villagers treated her as
(07:38):
though she were a visiting head of state. Right, So
this is amazing, and not only because she was deceiving
them all. What's amazing really is that they let her
stay in their village at all. The years following the
Napoleonic Wars were volatile and any mysterious strangers were looked
upon suspiciously as probable spies or maybe polite agitators, or
(08:01):
just unwanted people in the village. That's not only the
authorities who thought that. Everyday people thought that as well.
So in a small town like Almondsbury, foreign beggars were
most likely to be transported to Australia, and Australia was
where England sent their criminals. The counterfeit sixpence that she
(08:22):
carried with her was a serious offense and it could
in some cases, I mean a death sentence. Don't miss
around a fake currency is the rule here, kidding, watch
out for your sixpence. Like everyone at this point was
desperate to find out where Princess Cariboo was from, and
at first, despite her very European appearance, she kind of
(08:43):
implied that she had actually come from China, and it
really wasn't until a Portuguese sailor or a pirate depending
on your source, who may or may not have been
her accomplice in this whole ruse arrived about ten days
after her, and that's where her narrative actually starts to
be told. There are actually two versions of the story.
(09:05):
In the first, the sailor slash pirates claimed to understand
her dialect, and he told a story of how she'd
ended up near Bristol. In the second version, the sailor
pirates said he was able to communicate with her through
gestures and signs. The foreign woman, he said, was born
in China, which was actually she called it Kanji. She
(09:28):
had been kidnapped by pirates, jumped overboard to escape them,
and swam through the English Channel to shore. She also
told of her home on the far away island of
jabaf Su and that she came from royalty. What we
don't know, though, like Holly mentioned earlier, is if Mary
and the sailor pirate were somehow in cahoots. I don't
(09:49):
know how this works. If they're not, I know, right,
if she were just to go along with it and
be like, well, you are also a con person, all right,
let's play. Oh you understand I made up blank? Which
let's talk like So, this entire yarn was utterly enthralling
to the townspeople, and they actually had come to kind
of love their new eccentric guest, and she, for her part,
(10:11):
put on quite a show for them. She entertained audiences
that included not only people from Almondsbury. She fascinated a
lot of people, including linguists, artists, physiognomists. Those were people
that practiced the rather dubious science of judging a person's
mental character from their facial appearance. She also fascinated craniologists,
(10:31):
people that claimed to be able to read your character
from the size and shape of your skull. Whether entertaining
a vagrant or a dignitary, the princess's strange behavior did
not disappoint any of her audiences. Her portrait was painted
and reproduced in a local newspaper, while her authenticity was
attested to by a doctor Wilkinson, who was a polymath
(10:54):
and scientific lecturer. Wilkinson claimed he identified her language by
using Edmund fry S Pantagraphia, a book that was said
to contain accurate copies of all the known alphabets in
the world. Can you imagine how big that would be now?
He stated that marks on her skin had been done
(11:14):
by and we're quoting a very outdated term here, oriental surgeons.
Other newspapers began publishing stories about the princess, and she
began to develop national acclaim. What none of them knew
was that Mary had made up her language and she
was really a native English speaker. She would listen to
(11:35):
what everyone was saying while they thought she could not understand,
and that must have been heaven for her as an
impost right, and it was a big part in how
long she was able to pull off this hoax. It's
just so funny. I'm sure she sat in her head thinking, gosh,
these people are fool right, all bought in completely exactly.
She always seemed completely credible to the villagers, but it
(11:56):
was because they didn't know she was reading them to
manipulate the That's a common way that people scam others.
And so just for clarity, when we say she was
reading them, we mean she was able to interpret things
like people's body language and tone of voice and then
use that to her advantage. Perfect for someone who was
Princess Caribou. Uh So, the princess was eccentric and she
(12:19):
was scandalous. She wore flowers in her hair, and she
swam naked in the lake. How dare she? She knew
how to use a bow and arrow, and she gave
fencing demonstrations and it said with a blade that had
been dipped in poison. I don't know if it's arsenic,
but I got to bring it up every season before
(12:39):
eating or sleeping. She prayed to a god she called
Allah Tala. She was, it would seem, from all accounts,
having a fine time in Almondsbury. And for Elizabeth Worrel's part,
she was living out her own wish fulfillment because she
thought she was hosting a princess. But this ruse only
lasted for about three months, and the media was her
(12:59):
undue ing. The paper seized upon Baker's story during and
after her exposure, and even ran poetry and ballads, both
flattering and not so flattering, composed in her honor. But
it was when the Bristol Journal, which was a local newspaper,
ran a story about her with an accompanying photo she
was recognized as a woman named Mary Baker. Mrs Neil,
(13:22):
who owned a lodging house in Bristol, recognized Mary because
Mary had stayed there about six months prior, and according
to Mrs Neil, as a tenant, Mary would often Donna
Black Turban while she danced around the house, speaking in
her own invented languages. It was like she did her
practice run and Mrs Neil's boarding the jig is up. Yeah,
(13:46):
So the worlds confronted the so called princess, who did not,
of course want to tell the truth, at least at first,
but she did eventually admit that her name was Mary
Baker and that she was from Witheredge. So the way
this story played out made the papers across the United
States pick it up as well. The Carolina Federal Republican,
(14:07):
for example, round a story first describing a strange woman
who seemed initially to have no command of the English language,
and then went on to explain what finally led to
her confession. It was Dr Wilkinson's efforts to help her
and get the East India directors involved, And we have
a quote here from that specific news story. Dr Wilkinson
(14:28):
proceeded to London on a charitable mission on Tuesday and
was to be followed the next day by Cariboo herself.
But affairs were becoming too formidable. The idea of appearing
before the metropolitan scrutinizers was too terrible for the tender
nerves of the Princess of Java suit. She therefore thought
it was prudent to throw off the mask, and after
(14:49):
inviting her humane patroness to a private audience, surprised her
by speaking in her native tongue, plain downright English, declaring
herself an impostor. So we're going to take a break
here and have a word from a sponsor, and when
we're back we will talk about exactly how a town
was hoodwinked and what happened thereafter. Welcome back to Criminalia.
(15:21):
Let's meet Mary Baker. So Mary Baker did not, of course,
come from the far flung imaginary island of Java su.
She was exposed as a cobbler's daughter who came from
a village near Bristol. She had worked as domestic help,
but her employers had always thought she seemed rather odd.
And do you remember those marks that we discussed earlier,
(15:43):
and the marks on the back of her head, Yes,
the one that came with a racist diagnosis of what
it was exactly so actually it's not that at all.
They were scars from a poorly done wet cupping procedure
that was used to relieve pressure on we quote, an
overheated brain. It was performed in a poorhouse hospital when
she was a child and clearly had gone a little wrong.
(16:06):
Upon her exposure, the press went into an absolute frenzy,
but it didn't go exactly as you may expect. Yes,
of course, they absolutely ignored their own part in creating
the sensation around Princess Cariboo. But instead of vilifying Mary Baker,
which would seem like a reasonable response, they ended up
lampooning and condemning not only Wilkinson, but in some cases
(16:30):
also the worlds as well as the people of Almondsbury
and any and all of the intellectuals, doctors and other
professionals who had been hoodwinked essentially blaming them all for
being so easily fooled. Various newspapers published several satirical pieces
about Princess Cariboo's origin based on what the experts who
had met her had theorized. So it's the alternate universe
(16:54):
Princess therapy, right right. So, as we mentioned earlier, we're
going to do a little bit more on press coverage
of Mary's ruse because it's really quite interesting to get into.
If you start looking at the stories from that time,
you start to see why the newspapers wouldn't really want
(17:15):
to turn against Cariboo or Mary Baker. I guess we
should call her now. She was selling newspapers and at
the end of the day, to them, that's all that mattered. That, Yeah,
they did not want to get rid of that cash cow.
One example we have is the Morning Chronicle of London.
That was a paper that started running ads in the
late summer of eighteen seventeen about the story that they
(17:35):
were getting ready to run about her whole nuttiness a
foreigner near Bristol in an effort to get their readers
really hyped up. Those ads read quote in the course
of next week will be published a narrative of a
singular imposition practiced upon the benevolence of a lady residing
in the vicinity of the city of Bristol by a
(17:56):
young woman of the name of Mary Wilcox alias Baker,
alias Cariboo, Princess of Java. Su I would love to
see these illustrations, really and and also I particularly like
this story because they're not afraid of using caps. No,
they'll throw it all caps for the longest period of time.
Like newspapers were not shy about throwing some caps into
(18:19):
their ads of their stories. And man, I always appreciate that.
Moving on more than anyone. Though, it was Dr Wilkinson
who were skewered by the press for being taken in
by Mary's fictional tale. The Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle
of Portsmouth ran a piece about how naive Wilkinson had been,
and we have a quote from that too. So it
(18:41):
says the young woman who has appeared at Bristol as
an unknown female designated by the name of Caribou, and
concerning whom Dr Wilkinson of Bath excited great curiosity last
week by the interest which his pen imparted to her
tail is found to be an impostor. Her real name
said to be Mary Baker of with Rage Devon. The
(19:02):
Doctor was so far carried away by his feelings in
this interesting creature's case that he determined to make an
appeal to the East India Directors directly on her behalf,
as he had no doubt of her being a native
of Java. Yet, just to avoid confusion, that is Maria
reading the quote as it was written in the paper.
We're not sure why they shortened it to Java versus
(19:23):
Java Sue. My guess is that they recognized Java Sue
was not a real place and thought there had been
some sort of accident or confusion in the conveyance of
the information, so they looked up a real place. But
that same month, the Exeter Flying Post ran a similar story,
this time detailing previous criminal activity on Mary's part, and
(19:45):
that was a completely new angle in the press. This
piece started out Caribou with an exclamation point. It will
be seen in a preceding page of our paper that
the wonderful female who has outwitted the doctor, puzzle the
learned and astonished the multitude, turns out to be a
vile impostor, a vagrant wanderer and daughter of a poor
(20:08):
cottager in the village of Witherage in this county. We
have made some inquiries respecting this extraordinary young lady, and
there is great reason to believe that she was for
some time an inmate in the Devon County Bridewell. As
it appears that in the summer sessions of eighteen fourteen,
at the Castle of Exeter, a Mary Anne Baker, then
(20:28):
aged twenty one, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to six
months imprisonment for stealing a piece of cloth a young man.
Her sweetheart, the receiver of the stolen goods, was tried
at the same time and transported for fourteen years. Big
was that piece of cloth? Right? There's just a long
(20:48):
time for a piece of fabric. It made out of gold,
magic and gold threads. Ultimately, by June of eight seventeen,
the town of Almondsbury gave her boat fair to the
United States, specifically to travel to Philadelphia. She was accompanied by,
(21:10):
it said to or maybe three eight strict chaperones who
were chosen by Elizabeth Worrell. Because the story of Princess
Cariboo was already known in America, Mary was greeted like Royalty.
When she arrived, she stayed in the US and gave
performances as Princess Cariboo in theaters. And several years later
she did return to England. And when we say that
(21:31):
she was greeted as royalty, that includes the press using
her false name, even though they already knew that that
was a ruse and she was not actually a princess
of any kind. Noticed in this quote that we're about
to read that nowhere does the name Mary Baker appear. Uh.
And this ran in a paper in the US. Quote.
The extraordinary young woman who about two years ago excited
(21:53):
considerable attention at Bristol by representing herself as the Princess Cariboo,
daughter of a great Eastern prince, has lately returned to
with rich, her native place, on a visit to her mother.
It is understood that once she left Bristol, she went
to America with two ladies of the country. When she
left home about seven years ago, she was a servant
(22:13):
in a farmer's house. She now appears as a well
educated woman, perfectly genteel in her manners and dress, and
extremely fond of books, but very reserved in her communications,
respecting herself, not as an interesting description about Mary Baker,
so her hoax was really well known at this time.
(22:35):
But she continued to give performances as the character of
Princess Cariboo in and around London's New Bond Street, as
well as in Bath and Bristol. Mary Baker as Princess
Cariboo had her final appearance in a London gallery where
visitors were charged a shilling apiece to see her. It
was in Bristol in eight where Mary married. It was
(22:57):
probably her second marriage, because we know that while she
was pretending to be a princess, she had confessed her
real name was Mary Baker, but we're not presuming. There
are a lot of mysteries there about how her name
changed over the years. However, things get really quite fuzzy
after this point in her story. We also know that
(23:18):
she gave birth to a daughter in we know that
she no longer performed as Princess Cariboo or impersonated Royalty,
and by eighteen thirty nine she was making ends meet
by importing and selling leeches, mainly to the medical community,
which included the local Bristol Infirmary hospital. However, and here
(23:38):
is that really fuzzy part. There's a question about a
woman named Mary Burgess. This was our Mary. But is
the surname changed from marriage or the change that was
meant to hide a grift. Some reports suggest this name
change was due to her second marriage, after her husband
Richard Baker, left her and traveled abroad. Alternatively, their source
(24:00):
is that suggests she was living under her cousin's name,
Burgess Mary Wilcox Baker, a k a. Princess Caribou. Maybe
Burgess died on Christmas Eve in eighteen sixty four and
she is buried in an unmarked grave in Heaven Road
Burial Ground in Bedminster. We do have a little bit
(24:23):
of a side note that doesn't play well with someone's death. Here, Holly,
I'll give it to you. This story is actually made
into a movie, if you'd like to see it. That
movie was made and starts the absolutely spectacular Phoebe Kates right.
I've never seen it personally. I didn't know it existed.
(24:48):
So here we are with our very first drink for
season three. Ali Well, I thought for season three we
would flip our segment on its head a little a
bit because we're talking about imposters. Since they're masquerading his
cocktails in this segment will be mocktails. There will though
(25:09):
be for my drinkers in the crowd. Don't panic. There's
gonna be also a way you can modify any of
these to have a little oochin them if that's your jam.
But they're perfectly delightful on their own without any alcohol
in them. So the first one is called Princess Cariboos
Tender Nerves because when I was reading about that version
(25:33):
where they paint her as this really like delicate, I'm
so scared to go in front of the public. I'll
tell them all I'm lying. I'm like she's telling you,
she's lying. I'm telling like you, sweet baby girl. But anyway,
I wanted to think about something that always makes me
feel soothed when I am maybe a little nervous myself.
But also I'm one of those people that I don't
(25:54):
want anything that will overcome me, because usually if I'm nervous,
it's because I gotta get something done. I knew I
wanted to do a T, but I wanted to do
a T that is not like a cam of meal
or like an herbal I wanted something that still has caffeine.
So you're gonna brew a cup of chi and you're
gonna let it cool down a bit into that cup
of chi, and I would put this in a cocktail
(26:15):
shaker if you have one. You're gonna put a half
ounce of spicy mango syrup, pour that chi in with it,
mix it up a little bit because the chi, if
it's room temperature, it's gonna mix a little more easily
with the sugar. It will dissolve rather than if it's cold.
And then once it's mixed a little you're gonna pour
in two ounces of milk and some ice and you're
gonna shake a shake, a shake a shake it because
(26:36):
you really want everything incorporated. And it makes this nice,
very frothy if you've got a really good shaker action
going on. Beverage that is yummy and it's like a
a latte, but it's also not And the mango syrup
is a weird thing. About to ask you about that,
I'm like spicy mangoes, Like I don't even think I've
seen that, Like it sounds delicious, but you can buy.
(26:58):
But also if you can't find it somewhere, but you
can't find like mango syrup. You could also add in
something to give it a little bit of check, whether
that's like a little dash of cayenne pepper or just
anything that has a little bite to it, Like I
have a little Garama sala I put in everything. That's
another good one to mix in. If you've had a
chi latte, they're just beautiful on their own and you
(27:20):
get that yummy, soothing thing, but then there's this like
extra flavor where you're like, that seems a little different.
It's yummy, but you you clock it, you're aware that
there's something strange in the mix. And I feel like
that's a good representation of Princess Carricin right. People liked
her a lot, but they also were like, something's up
with this one and um, And then for my drinkers
in the crowd, if you do not want to have
(27:42):
Princess Cariboos tender nerves in its non alcoholic state, I
threw an announce of vanilla vodka and it became like
the perfect summer refresher. This is also a good time
for us to be doing mock tails because I feel
like we're at least in the Northern Hemisphere heading into
summer and most mock tails are very fruity and refreshing,
so that's another reason why we're going that route this time.
(28:02):
But you can always add a little something if you
want to make an adults. You could make this as
a warm drink if you want to. I thought about
that as soon as you were talking about it being chai. Yeah,
but I like a little cold chai. I think it's fun,
so yeah. Options, options, options. Also, if you're like a girl,
I don't want to do that spicy mango thing, you
can add any other flavored syrup. This would also be
(28:23):
it's beautiful With a raspberry syrup. It's a little less
surprising to your palate, but it's super duper yummy and
it gives it a broader body like you just you
feel like you're drinking something that's like a sweet, almost
dessert beverage. Then play around with syrups, see what's going
on there. Um, You could just use simple syrup if
you don't want to infuse it with any kind of flavor,
or you could also just do a drop or two
(28:45):
of any baking flavors. That works too. I actually think
a pumpkin version of this would be perfect for fall.
As you're heading into late summer and early fall. I
think that might be something that you need to test now.
Just I'll go do it so you're prepared. We thank
everybody for listening and spending this time with us, particularly
now that we are in a whole new season. If
(29:05):
you've been hanging in for the first two, we hope
you enjoyed this one. Also, if you're new to the show,
there's plenty for you to go back and listen to.
But otherwise we will see you back here next week
with another story of an imposter, another mock tail that
can also be made into a fabulous adult beverage, and
hopefully a lot more laughters. Thanks everybody. Criminalia is a
(29:28):
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the
I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
third season of Criminalia. Our first season was all about
women poisoners, and our second season was all about stalkers.
(00:23):
But this season we're exploring the lives and motivations of
some of the most notorious impostors throughout history. I'm Maria
T Marqi and I'm Holly Fry. Marian, I'm so excited
to be here with you for season three. Oh, it's
gonna be great. As we did in our first two seasons,
we planned to look at some of history's transgressions and
(00:43):
get a better understanding of what really went down. So
we're gonna take a look at how these crimes might
be seen through today's eyes. As we always say, a
little distance goes a long way. We do always say that.
So today we're going to talk about a woman who
pretended to be royalty from a far away island. But
first we have to talk about what makes an impostor.
(01:06):
Just to set this whole season up, impostors are people
who pretend to be someone else for their own game.
Often that's financial gain, but it's not unheard of for
an impostor to be dishonest to improve their social status
or social gain. Some make up a new identity, or
they steal your identity. Some impostors do it in order
(01:27):
to circumvent on just rules we're going to talk this
season about, you know, women who dressed like men in
order to fight in wars or to go to school.
And some are simply criminals looking for an easy way
to evade capture. So in today's world, impostors might impersonate
people in organizations that you would ordinarily trust. When someone
(01:48):
feigning to be the I r S Calls about an
unpaid bill, you would be inclined to assume that's the
real deal. They might also pretend to be someone that
you know, and they may pretend to work for play
pass such as the Social Security Administration or even your
local electric company. No matter who they pretend to work for, though,
their main goal is usually to get you to pay
(02:10):
them or to get enough of your personal information so
that they can pay themselves at your expense, and they
will try anyway they can to get that info. Modern
imposter scams often begin with an unsolicited phone call, email, text,
or even social media message, and our technology allows people
(02:31):
to use techniques like social engineering, which would be fishing
for confidential or personal information that they might use for
fraudulent purposes against you. You can also meet many of
today's impostors on dating sites or like we said, social media,
where they can have easily created fake profiles. We even
(02:53):
have the term cat fishing for this behavior. So it's
super common even with our technology, though it's the same
destination at always has been no matter what the story.
Many impostors are in it for money, and they will
eventually ask you to transfer funds to them, usually for
a reason that sounds pretty plausible and in jail. Right.
(03:15):
So all of that explained, let's finally set our scenes.
So our first impostor is a woman who was born
Mary Wilcox in sevente or two. Anyway, she was born
to a poor family living in Devon, England, and as
she became an adult, she adopted a disguise that she
(03:35):
hoped would make her more interesting to those she considered commoners.
So she became Princess Caribou, a fictional royal who pretended
to come from the far far away island of Java Suit.
Java Suit she claimed was located in the Indian Ocean. Okay,
it's a little bit early, but we're going to take
a break here for a word from our sponsors so
(03:57):
that we can keep the narrative of this impostors got
eyes altogether, and we're going to talk about the woman
who fooled a whole village into thinking she was royalty.
After this, welcome back to Criminalia. Let's meet the woman
(04:18):
who called herself Princess Caribou. One day in the spring
of eighteen seventeen, a woman in her mid twenties appeared
in the town of Almondsbury, near Bristol, speaking a never
heard before language, not a word of English. She wore
unusual clothing and a black turban on her head, and
(04:38):
she carried a small bundle with her that contained a
few necessities, so a few halfpennies and a counterfeit sixpence.
When she first encountered a resident of the village, it
was the cobbler, and he initially assumed she must be
a foreign peasant or some sort of beggar. The cobbler
and his wife took her to a man named Mr Overton,
(05:00):
who was the overseer of the local poorhouse. And if
you're not familiar with a poorhouse. It was a government
run facility that was used to house poor people in
a time before social services existed, But it wasn't as
benevolent as it may sound. The reality was that poor
houses were places of involuntary servitude. Upon seeing the person
(05:24):
that they would come to know as Princess Cariboo, Overton was,
as others in the town, mystified by her language and
how she dressed, and so he decided to take her
to the home of a man named Samuel Warrell, who
was the town clerk of Bristol and a magistrate. Samuel
Warrell and his wife Elizabeth, actually took this woman into
their home in Noll Park, and there the person we
(05:46):
know is Mary convinced Elizabeth that she was a lost
princess from the East Indies, which was what they would
have called it at the time. How she did this
we don't know. We're presuming a lot of hand gestures
and pointing at maps as sumed that she was homeless
and with a counterfeit coin in her pocket. A family
such as the Worlds, they were high standing family in
(06:08):
the town. It really couldn't provide accommodations to a woman
who actually might be a criminal. They didn't know it
would look poorly among their peers, though she had made
quite an impression on them. Elizabeth arranged for a room
for the woman she believed to be a foreign visitor
at a local inn called as far as we can figure,
I love this the Bowl. My new retirement goal is
(06:32):
to start an in and call it the Bowl, and
it'll just be our little in. Joe can let me
feel this. Although the worlds were still pretty unsure one
way or the other about Mary or Princess Cariboo and
who exactly this was, it was decided that she was
a beggar and should be taken to Bristol and tried
for vagrancy. And as an asside, we are not actually
(06:52):
sure who made this decision. It could have been the authorities,
or it could have been the very busy and involved
villagers of all Insburg. This decision was made to take
her to Bristol to be examined both by John Haythorne,
who was the mayor of Bristol, and then at St.
Peter's Hospital, which was a facility that cared for the
poor and her vagrance. But after causing many problems, and
(07:17):
we can only speculate on thoset problems because there doesn't
seem to be a record of her time spent at
the facility record in detail, she was actually returned to
the world's home. So, as you can imagine, by this
point everyone knew about this eccentric foreign stranger, and despite
any of those earlier suspicions, the villagers treated her as
(07:38):
though she were a visiting head of state. Right, So
this is amazing, and not only because she was deceiving
them all. What's amazing really is that they let her
stay in their village at all. The years following the
Napoleonic Wars were volatile and any mysterious strangers were looked
upon suspiciously as probable spies or maybe polite agitators, or
(08:01):
just unwanted people in the village. That's not only the
authorities who thought that. Everyday people thought that as well.
So in a small town like Almondsbury, foreign beggars were
most likely to be transported to Australia, and Australia was
where England sent their criminals. The counterfeit sixpence that she
(08:22):
carried with her was a serious offense and it could
in some cases, I mean a death sentence. Don't miss
around a fake currency is the rule here, kidding, watch
out for your sixpence. Like everyone at this point was
desperate to find out where Princess Cariboo was from, and
at first, despite her very European appearance, she kind of
(08:43):
implied that she had actually come from China, and it
really wasn't until a Portuguese sailor or a pirate depending
on your source, who may or may not have been
her accomplice in this whole ruse arrived about ten days
after her, and that's where her narrative actually starts to
be told. There are actually two versions of the story.
(09:05):
In the first, the sailor slash pirates claimed to understand
her dialect, and he told a story of how she'd
ended up near Bristol. In the second version, the sailor
pirates said he was able to communicate with her through
gestures and signs. The foreign woman, he said, was born
in China, which was actually she called it Kanji. She
(09:28):
had been kidnapped by pirates, jumped overboard to escape them,
and swam through the English Channel to shore. She also
told of her home on the far away island of
jabaf Su and that she came from royalty. What we
don't know, though, like Holly mentioned earlier, is if Mary
and the sailor pirate were somehow in cahoots. I don't
(09:49):
know how this works. If they're not, I know, right,
if she were just to go along with it and
be like, well, you are also a con person, all right,
let's play. Oh you understand I made up blank? Which
let's talk like So, this entire yarn was utterly enthralling
to the townspeople, and they actually had come to kind
of love their new eccentric guest, and she, for her part,
(10:11):
put on quite a show for them. She entertained audiences
that included not only people from Almondsbury. She fascinated a
lot of people, including linguists, artists, physiognomists. Those were people
that practiced the rather dubious science of judging a person's
mental character from their facial appearance. She also fascinated craniologists,
(10:31):
people that claimed to be able to read your character
from the size and shape of your skull. Whether entertaining
a vagrant or a dignitary, the princess's strange behavior did
not disappoint any of her audiences. Her portrait was painted
and reproduced in a local newspaper, while her authenticity was
attested to by a doctor Wilkinson, who was a polymath
(10:54):
and scientific lecturer. Wilkinson claimed he identified her language by
using Edmund fry S Pantagraphia, a book that was said
to contain accurate copies of all the known alphabets in
the world. Can you imagine how big that would be now?
He stated that marks on her skin had been done
(11:14):
by and we're quoting a very outdated term here, oriental surgeons.
Other newspapers began publishing stories about the princess, and she
began to develop national acclaim. What none of them knew
was that Mary had made up her language and she
was really a native English speaker. She would listen to
(11:35):
what everyone was saying while they thought she could not understand,
and that must have been heaven for her as an
impost right, and it was a big part in how
long she was able to pull off this hoax. It's
just so funny. I'm sure she sat in her head thinking, gosh,
these people are fool right, all bought in completely exactly.
She always seemed completely credible to the villagers, but it
(11:56):
was because they didn't know she was reading them to
manipulate the That's a common way that people scam others.
And so just for clarity, when we say she was
reading them, we mean she was able to interpret things
like people's body language and tone of voice and then
use that to her advantage. Perfect for someone who was
Princess Caribou. Uh So, the princess was eccentric and she
(12:19):
was scandalous. She wore flowers in her hair, and she
swam naked in the lake. How dare she? She knew
how to use a bow and arrow, and she gave
fencing demonstrations and it said with a blade that had
been dipped in poison. I don't know if it's arsenic,
but I got to bring it up every season before
(12:39):
eating or sleeping. She prayed to a god she called
Allah Tala. She was, it would seem, from all accounts,
having a fine time in Almondsbury. And for Elizabeth Worrel's part,
she was living out her own wish fulfillment because she
thought she was hosting a princess. But this ruse only
lasted for about three months, and the media was her
(12:59):
undue ing. The paper seized upon Baker's story during and
after her exposure, and even ran poetry and ballads, both
flattering and not so flattering, composed in her honor. But
it was when the Bristol Journal, which was a local newspaper,
ran a story about her with an accompanying photo she
was recognized as a woman named Mary Baker. Mrs Neil,
(13:22):
who owned a lodging house in Bristol, recognized Mary because
Mary had stayed there about six months prior, and according
to Mrs Neil, as a tenant, Mary would often Donna
Black Turban while she danced around the house, speaking in
her own invented languages. It was like she did her
practice run and Mrs Neil's boarding the jig is up. Yeah,
(13:46):
So the worlds confronted the so called princess, who did not,
of course want to tell the truth, at least at first,
but she did eventually admit that her name was Mary
Baker and that she was from Witheredge. So the way
this story played out made the papers across the United
States pick it up as well. The Carolina Federal Republican,
(14:07):
for example, round a story first describing a strange woman
who seemed initially to have no command of the English language,
and then went on to explain what finally led to
her confession. It was Dr Wilkinson's efforts to help her
and get the East India directors involved, And we have
a quote here from that specific news story. Dr Wilkinson
(14:28):
proceeded to London on a charitable mission on Tuesday and
was to be followed the next day by Cariboo herself.
But affairs were becoming too formidable. The idea of appearing
before the metropolitan scrutinizers was too terrible for the tender
nerves of the Princess of Java suit. She therefore thought
it was prudent to throw off the mask, and after
(14:49):
inviting her humane patroness to a private audience, surprised her
by speaking in her native tongue, plain downright English, declaring
herself an impostor. So we're going to take a break
here and have a word from a sponsor, and when
we're back we will talk about exactly how a town
was hoodwinked and what happened thereafter. Welcome back to Criminalia.
(15:21):
Let's meet Mary Baker. So Mary Baker did not, of course,
come from the far flung imaginary island of Java su.
She was exposed as a cobbler's daughter who came from
a village near Bristol. She had worked as domestic help,
but her employers had always thought she seemed rather odd.
And do you remember those marks that we discussed earlier,
(15:43):
and the marks on the back of her head, Yes,
the one that came with a racist diagnosis of what
it was exactly so actually it's not that at all.
They were scars from a poorly done wet cupping procedure
that was used to relieve pressure on we quote, an
overheated brain. It was performed in a poorhouse hospital when
she was a child and clearly had gone a little wrong.
(16:06):
Upon her exposure, the press went into an absolute frenzy,
but it didn't go exactly as you may expect. Yes,
of course, they absolutely ignored their own part in creating
the sensation around Princess Cariboo. But instead of vilifying Mary Baker,
which would seem like a reasonable response, they ended up
lampooning and condemning not only Wilkinson, but in some cases
(16:30):
also the worlds as well as the people of Almondsbury
and any and all of the intellectuals, doctors and other
professionals who had been hoodwinked essentially blaming them all for
being so easily fooled. Various newspapers published several satirical pieces
about Princess Cariboo's origin based on what the experts who
had met her had theorized. So it's the alternate universe
(16:54):
Princess therapy, right right. So, as we mentioned earlier, we're
going to do a little bit more on press coverage
of Mary's ruse because it's really quite interesting to get into.
If you start looking at the stories from that time,
you start to see why the newspapers wouldn't really want
(17:15):
to turn against Cariboo or Mary Baker. I guess we
should call her now. She was selling newspapers and at
the end of the day, to them, that's all that mattered. That, Yeah,
they did not want to get rid of that cash cow.
One example we have is the Morning Chronicle of London.
That was a paper that started running ads in the
late summer of eighteen seventeen about the story that they
(17:35):
were getting ready to run about her whole nuttiness a
foreigner near Bristol in an effort to get their readers
really hyped up. Those ads read quote in the course
of next week will be published a narrative of a
singular imposition practiced upon the benevolence of a lady residing
in the vicinity of the city of Bristol by a
(17:56):
young woman of the name of Mary Wilcox alias Baker,
alias Cariboo, Princess of Java. Su I would love to
see these illustrations, really and and also I particularly like
this story because they're not afraid of using caps. No,
they'll throw it all caps for the longest period of time.
Like newspapers were not shy about throwing some caps into
(18:19):
their ads of their stories. And man, I always appreciate that.
Moving on more than anyone. Though, it was Dr Wilkinson
who were skewered by the press for being taken in
by Mary's fictional tale. The Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle
of Portsmouth ran a piece about how naive Wilkinson had been,
and we have a quote from that too. So it
(18:41):
says the young woman who has appeared at Bristol as
an unknown female designated by the name of Caribou, and
concerning whom Dr Wilkinson of Bath excited great curiosity last
week by the interest which his pen imparted to her
tail is found to be an impostor. Her real name
said to be Mary Baker of with Rage Devon. The
(19:02):
Doctor was so far carried away by his feelings in
this interesting creature's case that he determined to make an
appeal to the East India Directors directly on her behalf,
as he had no doubt of her being a native
of Java. Yet, just to avoid confusion, that is Maria
reading the quote as it was written in the paper.
We're not sure why they shortened it to Java versus
(19:23):
Java Sue. My guess is that they recognized Java Sue
was not a real place and thought there had been
some sort of accident or confusion in the conveyance of
the information, so they looked up a real place. But
that same month, the Exeter Flying Post ran a similar story,
this time detailing previous criminal activity on Mary's part, and
(19:45):
that was a completely new angle in the press. This
piece started out Caribou with an exclamation point. It will
be seen in a preceding page of our paper that
the wonderful female who has outwitted the doctor, puzzle the
learned and astonished the multitude, turns out to be a
vile impostor, a vagrant wanderer and daughter of a poor
(20:08):
cottager in the village of Witherage in this county. We
have made some inquiries respecting this extraordinary young lady, and
there is great reason to believe that she was for
some time an inmate in the Devon County Bridewell. As
it appears that in the summer sessions of eighteen fourteen,
at the Castle of Exeter, a Mary Anne Baker, then
(20:28):
aged twenty one, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to six
months imprisonment for stealing a piece of cloth a young man.
Her sweetheart, the receiver of the stolen goods, was tried
at the same time and transported for fourteen years. Big
was that piece of cloth? Right? There's just a long
(20:48):
time for a piece of fabric. It made out of gold,
magic and gold threads. Ultimately, by June of eight seventeen,
the town of Almondsbury gave her boat fair to the
United States, specifically to travel to Philadelphia. She was accompanied by,
(21:10):
it said to or maybe three eight strict chaperones who
were chosen by Elizabeth Worrell. Because the story of Princess
Cariboo was already known in America, Mary was greeted like Royalty.
When she arrived, she stayed in the US and gave
performances as Princess Cariboo in theaters. And several years later
she did return to England. And when we say that
(21:31):
she was greeted as royalty, that includes the press using
her false name, even though they already knew that that
was a ruse and she was not actually a princess
of any kind. Noticed in this quote that we're about
to read that nowhere does the name Mary Baker appear. Uh.
And this ran in a paper in the US. Quote.
The extraordinary young woman who about two years ago excited
(21:53):
considerable attention at Bristol by representing herself as the Princess Cariboo,
daughter of a great Eastern prince, has lately returned to
with rich, her native place, on a visit to her mother.
It is understood that once she left Bristol, she went
to America with two ladies of the country. When she
left home about seven years ago, she was a servant
(22:13):
in a farmer's house. She now appears as a well
educated woman, perfectly genteel in her manners and dress, and
extremely fond of books, but very reserved in her communications,
respecting herself, not as an interesting description about Mary Baker,
so her hoax was really well known at this time.
(22:35):
But she continued to give performances as the character of
Princess Cariboo in and around London's New Bond Street, as
well as in Bath and Bristol. Mary Baker as Princess
Cariboo had her final appearance in a London gallery where
visitors were charged a shilling apiece to see her. It
was in Bristol in eight where Mary married. It was
(22:57):
probably her second marriage, because we know that while she
was pretending to be a princess, she had confessed her
real name was Mary Baker, but we're not presuming. There
are a lot of mysteries there about how her name
changed over the years. However, things get really quite fuzzy
after this point in her story. We also know that
(23:18):
she gave birth to a daughter in we know that
she no longer performed as Princess Cariboo or impersonated Royalty,
and by eighteen thirty nine she was making ends meet
by importing and selling leeches, mainly to the medical community,
which included the local Bristol Infirmary hospital. However, and here
(23:38):
is that really fuzzy part. There's a question about a
woman named Mary Burgess. This was our Mary. But is
the surname changed from marriage or the change that was
meant to hide a grift. Some reports suggest this name
change was due to her second marriage, after her husband
Richard Baker, left her and traveled abroad. Alternatively, their source
(24:00):
is that suggests she was living under her cousin's name,
Burgess Mary Wilcox Baker, a k a. Princess Caribou. Maybe
Burgess died on Christmas Eve in eighteen sixty four and
she is buried in an unmarked grave in Heaven Road
Burial Ground in Bedminster. We do have a little bit
(24:23):
of a side note that doesn't play well with someone's death. Here, Holly,
I'll give it to you. This story is actually made
into a movie, if you'd like to see it. That
movie was made and starts the absolutely spectacular Phoebe Kates right.
I've never seen it personally. I didn't know it existed.
(24:48):
So here we are with our very first drink for
season three. Ali Well, I thought for season three we
would flip our segment on its head a little a
bit because we're talking about imposters. Since they're masquerading his
cocktails in this segment will be mocktails. There will though
(25:09):
be for my drinkers in the crowd. Don't panic. There's
gonna be also a way you can modify any of
these to have a little oochin them if that's your jam.
But they're perfectly delightful on their own without any alcohol
in them. So the first one is called Princess Cariboos
Tender Nerves because when I was reading about that version
(25:33):
where they paint her as this really like delicate, I'm
so scared to go in front of the public. I'll
tell them all I'm lying. I'm like she's telling you,
she's lying. I'm telling like you, sweet baby girl. But anyway,
I wanted to think about something that always makes me
feel soothed when I am maybe a little nervous myself.
But also I'm one of those people that I don't
(25:54):
want anything that will overcome me, because usually if I'm nervous,
it's because I gotta get something done. I knew I
wanted to do a T, but I wanted to do
a T that is not like a cam of meal
or like an herbal I wanted something that still has caffeine.
So you're gonna brew a cup of chi and you're
gonna let it cool down a bit into that cup
of chi, and I would put this in a cocktail
(26:15):
shaker if you have one. You're gonna put a half
ounce of spicy mango syrup, pour that chi in with it,
mix it up a little bit because the chi, if
it's room temperature, it's gonna mix a little more easily
with the sugar. It will dissolve rather than if it's cold.
And then once it's mixed a little you're gonna pour
in two ounces of milk and some ice and you're
gonna shake a shake, a shake a shake it because
(26:36):
you really want everything incorporated. And it makes this nice,
very frothy if you've got a really good shaker action
going on. Beverage that is yummy and it's like a
a latte, but it's also not And the mango syrup
is a weird thing. About to ask you about that,
I'm like spicy mangoes, Like I don't even think I've
seen that, Like it sounds delicious, but you can buy.
(26:58):
But also if you can't find it somewhere, but you
can't find like mango syrup. You could also add in
something to give it a little bit of check, whether
that's like a little dash of cayenne pepper or just
anything that has a little bite to it, Like I
have a little Garama sala I put in everything. That's
another good one to mix in. If you've had a
chi latte, they're just beautiful on their own and you
(27:20):
get that yummy, soothing thing, but then there's this like
extra flavor where you're like, that seems a little different.
It's yummy, but you you clock it, you're aware that
there's something strange in the mix. And I feel like
that's a good representation of Princess Carricin right. People liked
her a lot, but they also were like, something's up
with this one and um, And then for my drinkers
in the crowd, if you do not want to have
(27:42):
Princess Cariboos tender nerves in its non alcoholic state, I
threw an announce of vanilla vodka and it became like
the perfect summer refresher. This is also a good time
for us to be doing mock tails because I feel
like we're at least in the Northern Hemisphere heading into
summer and most mock tails are very fruity and refreshing,
so that's another reason why we're going that route this time.
(28:02):
But you can always add a little something if you
want to make an adults. You could make this as
a warm drink if you want to. I thought about
that as soon as you were talking about it being chai. Yeah,
but I like a little cold chai. I think it's fun,
so yeah. Options, options, options. Also, if you're like a girl,
I don't want to do that spicy mango thing, you
can add any other flavored syrup. This would also be
(28:23):
it's beautiful With a raspberry syrup. It's a little less
surprising to your palate, but it's super duper yummy and
it gives it a broader body like you just you
feel like you're drinking something that's like a sweet, almost
dessert beverage. Then play around with syrups, see what's going
on there. Um, You could just use simple syrup if
you don't want to infuse it with any kind of flavor,
or you could also just do a drop or two
(28:45):
of any baking flavors. That works too. I actually think
a pumpkin version of this would be perfect for fall.
As you're heading into late summer and early fall. I
think that might be something that you need to test now.
Just I'll go do it so you're prepared. We thank
everybody for listening and spending this time with us, particularly
now that we are in a whole new season. If
(29:05):
you've been hanging in for the first two, we hope
you enjoyed this one. Also, if you're new to the show,
there's plenty for you to go back and listen to.
But otherwise we will see you back here next week
with another story of an imposter, another mock tail that
can also be made into a fabulous adult beverage, and
hopefully a lot more laughters. Thanks everybody. Criminalia is a
(29:28):
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the
I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Maria Trimarchi
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