Princess Caraboo
One day in April 1817, a cobbler in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire met an apparently disoriented young woman wearing exotic clothes who was speaking an incomprehensible language. This was the beginning of the story of the mysterious Princess Caraboo.
The cobbler's wife took this stranger to the Overseer of the Poor, who placed her in the hands of the local county magistrate, Samuel Worrall.
Worrall and his American-born wife Elizabeth could not understand her either; what they did determine was that she called herself Caraboo and that she was interested in Chinese imagery. They sent her to the local inn, where she identified a drawing of a pineapple with the word 'nanas', meaning pineapple in Indonesian languages, and insisted on sleeping on the floor. This aroused much interest. Samuel Worrall was unsure what to do with her but decided to play it safe and send her to Bristol to be tried for vagrancy.
During her imprisonment, a Portuguese sailor said he spoke her language and translated her story. According to the sailor, she was Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean. She had been captured by pirates and after a long voyage she had jumped overboard in the Bristol Channel and swum ashore.
The Worralls took Caraboo to their home, and for ten weeks, this representative of exotic royalty became a celebrity amongst the local middle classes. She used a bow and arrow, fenced, swam naked and prayed to a god, whom she named Allah-Talla. She acquired exotic clothing and her portrait was painted and reproduced in local newspapers. Her authenticity was attested to by a Dr. Wilkinson, who identified her language using Edmund Fry's Pantographia and stated that marks on the back of her head were the work of oriental surgeons. Newspapers published stories about Princess Caraboo's adventures and she even had a ball in Bath held in her honour.
Eventually the truth surfaced. A boarding-house keeper, Mrs. Neale, recognised her from the picture in the Bristol Journal and informed her hosts. This would-be princess was in truth Mary Willcocks, a cobbler's daughter from Witheridge, Devon. She had been a servant girl around England but had found no place to stay. She invented her fictitious language from imaginary and Romani words and created an exotic character to attract sympathy and attention.
The British press made much of the hoax at the expense of the duped rustic middle-class. Mrs. Worrall took pity on her and arranged for her to travel to Philadelphia for a new life.
"Princess Caraboo" stayed in America for several years, continuing her pretence with mixed success. In 1824 she returned to Britain and died in Bristol at the age of 72, having spent much of her remaining career as an importer of leeches for hospital use.
Further reading
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