Speaker 1: You're listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: Folks.
Speaker 1: It's a huge.
Speaker 2: When us Evil Blood to see you there.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Hoax, a podcast about the lies we wish
Speaker 3: were true and truths that sound like lies.
Speaker 1: I'm the ghost of Danish Worts and.
Speaker 2: I'm the evil twin of Lizzie Logan. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: So Lizzie, this is a rare time in this podcast
Speaker 3: where I am going to be talking about a hoax
Speaker 3: that I have covered on Noble Blood my other.
Speaker 2: Podcast, Self Plagiarisms.
Speaker 3: Self Plagiarism. I did go back to the same well
Speaker 3: of research. But the reason that I wanted to talk
Speaker 3: about it is because I feel like sometimes the format
Speaker 3: of Noble Blood one this is just a quintessential hoax
Speaker 3: and it is delightful. But also I think the form
Speaker 3: of Noble Blood is like a scripted show with a
Speaker 3: one single narratives sometimes means I can't explore things in
Speaker 3: as wide reaching away as I want to.
Speaker 2: It lacks a little Lizzy.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's actually what I was gonna say. I'm
Speaker 1: not on Noble Blood.
Speaker 3: Really, I was gonna say it doesn't have Lizzy's take
Speaker 3: on it, and you know, I would never. I don't
Speaker 3: really often pause Noble Blood episodes to be like I
Speaker 3: always take the historical consensus. But I never paused and like, oh,
Speaker 3: this source is this, and this source says that, and
Speaker 3: I mean, very rarely do I do that.
Speaker 1: So I am excited to.
Speaker 3: Talk a little bit about the broader historical context around
Speaker 3: a hoax called Princess Cariboo.
Speaker 2: Okay, great, I think I've listened to this Noble Blood episode,
Speaker 2: but I think it was a long time ago.
Speaker 1: It was a long time.
Speaker 2: I have a vision of myself listening to it at
Speaker 2: the gym, and it's been so long since I went
Speaker 2: to on Ghim, and I'm like, it couldn't have been
Speaker 2: this year, and it couldn't have been last year.
Speaker 3: It was, in fact, a very long time ago. Okay,
Speaker 3: So we're going to start the story on April Good Friday.
Speaker 3: Some people say it took place at Thursday before, but
Speaker 3: most of the story takes place Good Friday, eighteen seventeen. Okay,
Speaker 3: so Frankenstein's about to be written. I think Bridgerton is
Speaker 3: probably happening around this time. Anatomy a love story if
Speaker 3: you're thinking about costumes and what's happening.
Speaker 1: In England at this time, and we're in England. We
Speaker 1: are in England.
Speaker 3: We're in Bristol, which is the far west of England,
Speaker 3: like almost whales, okay. And a woman arrives at the
Speaker 3: small town of Almondsbury, which is right outside Bristol, and
Speaker 3: she's wearing what are described as exotic clothes, which in
Speaker 3: this case just means like a black turbin a head
Speaker 3: covering a black gown with like a muslin frill at
Speaker 3: the neck and a red and black shawl.
Speaker 1: To me, looking pretty cool outfit pictures of it.
Speaker 3: It kind of looks like a like a stereo, like
Speaker 3: a child dressing like a flamenco dancer.
Speaker 1: Oh funny, Like I'm not an accurate reflection of that,
Speaker 1: but it's like a girl like putting a scarf on
Speaker 1: and being like I'm Spanish, yes, like a child.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 3: And she has a bundle and this is important, carrying soap.
Speaker 3: Just a few haypennies and a counterfeit sixpence and that's
Speaker 3: all she has. And this young woman goes to the
Speaker 3: house of a cobbler first and talks.
Speaker 1: To him and his wife.
Speaker 3: But she's not speaking English, just sort of an unintelligible language,
Speaker 3: and she mimes that she's hungry. They give her some food,
Speaker 3: and then she mimes like, oh, can I sleep here,
Speaker 3: and they're like no, yeah, no, no no. And the
Speaker 3: cobbler's wife takes this woman to the Overseer of the poor,
Speaker 3: who's a person who's in charge of what It sounds
Speaker 3: like he's like the one who levies taxes on people
Speaker 3: and then manages those taxes to manage poorhouses and distribute food, money,
Speaker 3: and clothing. Feels like the overseer of the poor is
Speaker 3: exactly he should be overseeing this situation.
Speaker 1: That's who you call.
Speaker 3: And the overseer, though also pawnts her off on someone else.
Speaker 3: He goes to like the local magistrate, sort of the
Speaker 3: mayor equivalent of this town. Samuel Wirrel and his American
Speaker 3: born wife Elizabeth to like figure out this whole thing.
Speaker 2: Two questions, how old does this woman appear to be?
Speaker 1: And like what color is she? Young? Pretty? You're asking
Speaker 1: like race, like.
Speaker 2: Just appearance wise, because if she can't talk, then she
Speaker 2: can't really explain her ethnicity, but just like like purely
Speaker 2: on the surface, so again it means she could talk.
Speaker 2: In the nineteenth century, our understanding of race is different
Speaker 2: than it is now. She has dark hair and dark eyes. Okay,
Speaker 2: she is in fact like a white person, but that
Speaker 2: she's also sort of just like swarthy. Okay, so she
Speaker 2: doesn't seem English.
Speaker 3: Maybe doesn't seem English. And again she's not dressed like
Speaker 3: an English woman. She's speaking another language. And she's a
Speaker 3: poor beggar woman. But this is also a case where
Speaker 3: I do feel like pretty privileged really does exist. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: where this isn't just like an old crone. This is
Speaker 3: like a very pretty young woman, and I think that
Speaker 3: makes a difference in the story. And so as you're
Speaker 3: listening to the story and how people are treating her,
Speaker 3: I think the fact that she is pretty makes a difference,
Speaker 3: oh totally, which is just an unfortunate reality of the
Speaker 3: world then as it is now, I feel like fundamentally
Speaker 3: there was a big to do. I think the equivalent
Speaker 3: to the stories, there's a big to do because there
Speaker 3: was a very handsome convict at one point.
Speaker 5: Do you remember this, oh, like yeah, the hot felon,
Speaker 5: the hot felon, And there's a whole account that's like
Speaker 5: mug Shouty's yeah, like bugshot of like Shouty's.
Speaker 3: I think fundamentally, if you see an unhoused person or
Speaker 3: a convict, a felon who is very conventionally attractive, something
Speaker 3: in you is like, well, that person shouldn't be there,
Speaker 3: they should be doing pilates.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: Jim Gaffigan has a whole bit about how actors are
Speaker 2: way too good looking to be believable, like in certain
Speaker 2: roles where he talks about like halle Berry and Monster's Ball,
Speaker 2: He's like, she played that poverty stricken woman.
Speaker 1: The whole time.
Speaker 2: I was like, why doesn't she just become a model?
Speaker 2: She could be the next sale Berry.
Speaker 3: So basically they bring her to this magistrate to figure
Speaker 3: out what her deal is, and she acts pretty unusually.
Speaker 3: She sleeps only on the floor of the room, even
Speaker 3: though there's a bed. And then when they bring her
Speaker 3: to like a local inn called the Bowl, their botanical
Speaker 3: prints are very popular around this time, like on the wall,
Speaker 3: and she sees a botanical print of a pineapple and
Speaker 3: says nanas, which is nanas are like is a word
Speaker 3: for pineapple and Indonesian but also a lot of other
Speaker 3: different languages, and people are like, oh, she knows what
Speaker 3: the exotic fruit, pineapple is and then they show her
Speaker 3: pictures of China and she gets like very animated and excited,
Speaker 3: even though they don't know what language she's speaking. So
Speaker 3: they're like, Okay, maybe this woman came from Asia. So again,
Speaker 3: sam Old Worrel is the magistrate of this town, but
Speaker 3: he doesn't want to be associated with a counterfeitter because
Speaker 3: they had found a counterfeit coin in her purse, and
Speaker 3: he's like, I don't want to get in trouble for this.
Speaker 3: I'm going to have this woman be tried for vagrancy
Speaker 3: in Bristol because he thinks she's just a vagrant.
Speaker 2: I don't want to get in trouble for being around
Speaker 2: this person who did this crime.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's my job.
Speaker 3: Well you should turn her into the authorities, all right.
Speaker 3: I will also say different sources sometimes characterize Samuel Warrel
Speaker 3: very ungenerously, like people are like he's a drunk and
Speaker 3: a cruel man, and I take those with the grain
Speaker 3: of salt, because a lot of contemporary sources just don't
Speaker 3: comment on his personality. And I think if you are
Speaker 3: embellishing this story, you want to like add a little
Speaker 3: spice to the side. Characters and you're like, ah, well,
Speaker 3: he sent her to be tried for vagrancy. What a
Speaker 3: cruel man, presumably a drunkard. So you might see when
Speaker 3: researching this story, might see things like that. I just
Speaker 3: am like, I don't know. He didn't want to get
Speaker 3: involved with this strange woman acting in a weird way.
Speaker 3: But she is briefly imprisoned, and it's while she's in
Speaker 3: Bristol that she meets a Portuguese sailor and sometimes in
Speaker 3: some sources he's named Manuel Ennis, but I've also seen
Speaker 3: Manuel Inesso, and he says that he actually understands the
Speaker 3: language that she's speaking, and he's able to translate and
Speaker 3: says that according to this woman, her name is Princess Caribou.
Speaker 3: She's from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean,
Speaker 3: right off of Sumatra. She was kidnapped from her homeland
Speaker 3: by pirates, managed to escape by jumping overboard, and that's
Speaker 3: how she ended up in Bristol. And from this translation
Speaker 3: of the Portuguese sailor, we learned that she's the daughter
Speaker 3: of a Chinese person of rank and a male woman,
Speaker 3: which is a indigenous tribe to this group, like an
Speaker 3: indigenous ethnic group in what we now call the Indonesian Islands.
Speaker 3: Javasu again located off the coast of Sumatra.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to do a.
Speaker 3: Brief spoiler for people who maybe are like, I don't
Speaker 3: know where Javasu is. That's not a real place. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: it doesn't sound real. It well sounds kind of like Java, yes,
Speaker 3: and Sumatra. But you're like, okay, sort of put them together. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it's not real. But what's happening right now in
Speaker 3: England is the exotic is very exciting.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so this woman is let out of prison and
Speaker 3: the worlds, drunk and cruel, are not take her back
Speaker 3: to their house. And this is where like two months
Speaker 3: of the best summer we ever had started. So she
Speaker 3: is staying with the worlds in this small town and
Speaker 3: it is just like.
Speaker 2: Do they keep this Portuguese guy around to continue translating? No,
Speaker 2: it seems like he's really key to this whole thing.
Speaker 3: By this point, she's able to communicate enough, okay, And
Speaker 3: I think part of like her childlike inability to articulate
Speaker 3: things is part of her I'm gonna say air quotes charm.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: I also again want to be like she's very pretty.
Speaker 3: She has this sort of childlike approach to things, and
Speaker 3: I think that's why people get very excited about her.
Speaker 2: There's a great YouTube video that as far as I know,
Speaker 2: this YouTube video is what coined the term, but it's
Speaker 2: a term that people use now to describe this character
Speaker 2: trope in movies mostly born sexy, yesterday born sexy.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what she is.
Speaker 4: Where it's like Leelu in The Fifth Element or a
Speaker 4: little bit Madison and Splash, Yeah, or Bella in a
Speaker 4: Poor Things, where it's usually a woman who has the
Speaker 4: body of a hot woman and the brain of a child,
Speaker 4: not for creepy reasons, but for like sci fi reasons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so she's very helpless and then she's also
Speaker 2: very sex for.
Speaker 3: Some reason, my brain also goes to like mermaid things.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to like, you know, the woman in
Speaker 3: Splash Yeah, like in Aquamarine, Yes, that girl where it's
Speaker 3: just like I'm just so helpless and silly and naive
Speaker 3: with my strange custom Yeah, like how do this work? Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's othering a foreigner, but it's not racist. If she's
Speaker 3: a mermaid.
Speaker 2: It's infantilizing a grown woman so that you can still
Speaker 2: want to fuck her, and also she has no agency.
Speaker 3: That is exactly what's happening with this woman. So a
Speaker 3: ton of visitors are coming through Almondsbury because they're all
Speaker 3: so excited to see her. The Worls are very excited
Speaker 3: that they have a royal visitor. And Samuel Wirrel is
Speaker 3: actually starting a private bank at this time, and he
Speaker 3: feels like the publicity and sort of the esteem of
Speaker 3: having a royal guest is like bolstering his local business.
Speaker 1: Surely the answer to this question will be no.
Speaker 2: But does anyone have the idea of like, oh, we
Speaker 2: should probably get her home.
Speaker 1: No, Okay, she's an England now, I wonderful. She's a
Speaker 1: princess where she's from. Why does she want to leave
Speaker 1: with these people? Because maybe because she's having a freaking blast.
Speaker 1: She's a princess, I know.
Speaker 3: So there's all these anecdotes because a few I'm not
Speaker 3: to jump ahead, but newspapers get word of her and
Speaker 3: we'll write all these anecdotes. So a lot of our
Speaker 3: sources for these unusual things she does come from newspapers.
Speaker 3: But according to one source, this gentleman who had visited
Speaker 3: Malae in recent years brought out a souvenir sword and caribou.
Speaker 3: The princess gets very excited and recognizes it as belonging
Speaker 3: to her country, and they even say she tries to
Speaker 3: grab at it, but quote from prudence, it was denied her,
Speaker 3: which is very born sexy.
Speaker 1: Yesterday it's like, well, she can't have a night, uh, and.
Speaker 3: Then she but she placed the dagger to her right side,
Speaker 3: where according to this gentleman who had visited Malley, the
Speaker 3: Malay people wore it, which quote confirmed to this gentleman
Speaker 3: that she perfectly understood the custom, though not the language
Speaker 3: of that country, because she is not speaking malee okay,
Speaker 3: she is in fact not speaking any language that anyone
Speaker 3: really recognizes. There's a sort of a local expert, like
Speaker 3: a polymath named doctor Wilkinson, who shows her this book
Speaker 3: Edmund Fry's Pantagraphia, which has is like a manual of
Speaker 3: different languages, and she picks hers, which he identifies as
Speaker 3: one called Reijng, which is I believe spoken in Sumatra.
Speaker 3: And this doctor also identifies that she has strange markings
Speaker 3: on her head, scars that could only have come he says,
Speaker 3: from Eastern medicine practices, some sort of barbaric surgery.
Speaker 2: Wow, okay, so she's from like all over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she has some strange scars on her head and
Speaker 3: we're like, we don't know what that is. They send
Speaker 3: samples of her language to Oxford to be like, do
Speaker 3: you know what this is? And they're like no, so
Speaker 3: no one quite. I mean this doctor Wilkinson identified what
Speaker 3: he thought the language was, but no one quite knows
Speaker 3: what she's saying, even though some of the words she's
Speaker 3: using are specific to Indonesian languages.
Speaker 2: Did you in middle school read The Island of the
Speaker 2: Blue Dolphins.
Speaker 1: Yes, I love that book. It's like the real version
Speaker 1: of this, real version of Island of the Blue Dolphins. Well, no,
Speaker 1: the Island of the Blue Dolphins is based on a
Speaker 1: real lady. What a woman's whole family left her behind
Speaker 1: on an island. I think they all died or something.
Speaker 2: And then she was like the if I'm remembering fourth
Speaker 2: grade correctly, she got separated from her family or whatever
Speaker 2: and became the last person in the world who spoke
Speaker 2: her language.
Speaker 3: Okay, I did not realize Island of the Blue Dolphin
Speaker 3: was inspired by a real story.
Speaker 2: Can we very quickly check if I'm write yes.
Speaker 3: Yes, the lone woman of San Nicholas Island left the
Speaker 3: one for eighteen years.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, this woman crazy again. No one, it's it's
Speaker 3: hard to get to the place that she came from.
Speaker 3: No one really understands the language. But they're having just
Speaker 3: a fun summer with Okay, she's doing She swims naked.
Speaker 1: Hot hot.
Speaker 3: She practices archery and is apparently very good at it. Okay, good, badass,
Speaker 3: badass cooks a chicken curry, performs a war dance with
Speaker 3: a gong, and prays on the roof to a god
Speaker 3: that she calls a La tala, which is also a
Speaker 3: name for a god in a bunch of a few
Speaker 3: other languages.
Speaker 1: Allah is yeah, most great. Yeah.
Speaker 3: She also declines to drink alcohol. She brings one or
Speaker 3: both of her hands to her forehead to greet people.
Speaker 3: She quote bathed more than more often than was the custom,
Speaker 3: and we're a shawl while praying. They also just put
Speaker 3: her in exotic clothing and have her portrait painted and
Speaker 3: throw a ball for her in her honor and bath.
Speaker 1: Kind of like et. Yeah, but they're all having a
Speaker 1: great time. I mean, what to do next?
Speaker 3: So this doctor doctor Wilkinson, who examined her head and
Speaker 3: examined her language, published her findings. There's a Telegraph article
Speaker 3: written about her.
Speaker 1: This is you know, June.
Speaker 3: At this point, one of the war el servants, allegedly
Speaker 3: who's a Greek Man, doesn't think she's legit, and he
Speaker 3: decides to test her, and in the middle of the
Speaker 3: night he walks around and shouts fire to see if
Speaker 3: she would react, because that would prove that she knew English.
Speaker 1: But she didn't.
Speaker 3: This story, over the course of about eight weeks, gains
Speaker 3: in popularity. I think I understand why, which is kind
Speaker 3: of I don't want to get ahead of myself. But
Speaker 3: the reason people are so interested in this story, I
Speaker 3: think is kind of the main fascination here. But this
Speaker 3: story becomes so well known that this woman named missus Neil,
Speaker 3: who runs a boarding house in Bristol, hears about it
Speaker 3: and sees a photograph photographs he's a drawing of this
Speaker 3: young woman in the newspaper, and she recognizes the picture
Speaker 3: of her published in the Bristol Journal and goes to
Speaker 3: inform the worlds that, oh, this girl that you're calling
Speaker 3: Princess Caribou, I know her. She's a former servant and
Speaker 3: her name is Mary Wilcox and when she lived in
Speaker 3: the boarding house that I ran, she just like would
Speaker 3: sometimes wear a turban and do a made up language
Speaker 3: for fun.
Speaker 1: I'm obsessed with her. I love her so much. This
Speaker 1: is incredible. I love how much she has committed to
Speaker 1: the best.
Speaker 3: She's She's really the patron saint of committing to the bit.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is like Nathan Fielder wishes like, this
Speaker 2: is jury duty, but uno, reverse Uh, this is.
Speaker 1: Just her turning everyone else into the jury duty.
Speaker 2: She's just pranking. I mean, the greatest character actress of
Speaker 2: our time.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 3: I want to point out, and we'll get to this
Speaker 3: a little later. She is exploiting in other people of
Speaker 3: different races. Yeah, to be like a slight buzzkill here,
Speaker 3: she's not just doing like a quirky character, but she
Speaker 3: is the queen of committing to the bit.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna not give her a pass for being of
Speaker 2: her time, but I'm gonna contextualize her as being of
Speaker 2: all of the things that people are doing.
Speaker 1: Yes, in the pre Civil war world, I.
Speaker 2: Realize this is in England. Yeah, this to be does
Speaker 2: not rank among the atrocities.
Speaker 3: So not the atrocities to people of color, and I
Speaker 3: also want to point out I don't think the problem
Speaker 3: is as much with her as it is everyone around her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if they didn't want to believe in racist stereotypes,
Speaker 2: there would have been no stereotypes for her to exploit.
Speaker 1: That is it.
Speaker 3: It's everyone around her delighted that she is indulging exactly
Speaker 3: the racist stereotype that they.
Speaker 1: Want to enjoy. What a grifter?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So who is Mary Wilcox. She was born we're
Speaker 3: in seventeen ninety one or ninety two in Devonshire. Her
Speaker 3: father was a cobbler. We don't know anything about her mother.
Speaker 1: Is that why she went to a cobbler house? Oh?
Speaker 1: Because she was like, I know how to get around
Speaker 1: a cobbler house. Maybe I never even put that together.
Speaker 1: This is what I do. These things are not coming
Speaker 1: up on Noble.
Speaker 3: Her dad apparently said that when she was young she
Speaker 3: suffered from rheumatic fever, which affected her mentally after that.
Speaker 3: So we don't even know what's going on up there.
Speaker 3: She little kookie, she's a little kookie. She left home
Speaker 3: at nineteen, came to London and she got very sick
Speaker 3: and went to a poorhouse hospital and received an improperly
Speaker 3: done cupping operation on her head and that was what
Speaker 3: gave her the scars, which I find very funny. It's
Speaker 3: like people being like, oh, only a primitive Eastern country
Speaker 3: could have possibly done this her, and it's like, no,
Speaker 3: this happened in London. Yeah bye, because she was a
Speaker 3: poor person at the hospital. Yeah, it's people not realizing
Speaker 3: the barbaric practices are what they're doing in their own communities.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: She worked as a nurse maid for a family in
Speaker 3: Clapham and apparently the children really liked her. She was
Speaker 3: very imaginative with stories, so I like it. Then she
Speaker 3: got very interested in their Jewish neighbors. She just like
Speaker 3: loved their language and their prayers. I mean, we love
Speaker 3: an ally, we love someone being interested in the community.
Speaker 1: What it's an anti Semite, like a pro Semite.
Speaker 3: She gets fired from her job for attending a Jewish wedding.
Speaker 2: I know that is insane.
Speaker 3: I know it's I like, I love an Ally, but
Speaker 3: I also there's like the bit of balance here where
Speaker 3: she was like maybe a little too interested in their
Speaker 3: prayer and language, where I do feel a little like
Speaker 3: have you read that Judge Judy interview with RuPaul?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, We're like, incorporating Judaism into your personality is
Speaker 3: maybe something you don't need.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but like attending a wedding to me is like
Speaker 2: the wedding is great, Like that's fun.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like go celebrate, Go celebrate. She shouldn't have gotten fired.
Speaker 3: No justice for Mary Wilcox, Yeah, but she did. This
Speaker 3: is also one of the most iconic details about her
Speaker 3: that I love. She gets admitted to a Magdalen hospital
Speaker 3: for fallen women, which is like where us text workers
Speaker 3: would go because quote, she admired the uniform of brown
Speaker 3: dresses and straw hats for the inmates. So she sees
Speaker 3: that these women, these fallen women in a Magdalen hospital
Speaker 3: are wearing brown dresses and straw hats, and she's like,
Speaker 3: I like that, and so she gets in.
Speaker 2: That's like the opposite of Maria von Trapp being like
Speaker 2: I love what's going on with the nuns, I'll become
Speaker 2: a nun. She's like, I love what's going on with
Speaker 2: the sex workers. I'll hang out with the sex worker.
Speaker 3: She gets kicked out when it's discovered that she's not
Speaker 3: actually a sex worker, and then we get pieces of
Speaker 3: her backstory from here where we're just kind of assuming
Speaker 3: and putting pieces together. We know, she hops around, possibly
Speaker 3: goes to France, where she learned some French. She becomes pregnant,
Speaker 3: gives birth in secret. At first she says the father
Speaker 3: was a brick layer from Essex. Later she'll say it
Speaker 3: was a Frenchman she met in a bookshop. The child
Speaker 3: passes away very tragically. And this is when Mary hits
Speaker 3: the road with a group of Romani people. And this
Speaker 3: is kind of important because there's a lot of their
Speaker 3: language and culture that she'll sort of imitate in her
Speaker 3: own little way. She'll take the seeds and then have
Speaker 3: fun with it. Yeah, she becomes a beggar in Bristol
Speaker 3: because she got fired for going to a Jewish wedding
Speaker 3: what she was supposed to do. And this is kind
Speaker 3: of where the seeds of the Caribou trick are born,
Speaker 3: because she notices in Bristol there are girls who are
Speaker 3: from Brittany who are like ethnic Bretons and that's like
Speaker 3: a Celtic ethnic group. And she noticed that the Breton
Speaker 3: girls make more money because they're begging in their traditional
Speaker 3: Breton clothing. And she's like, hmm, okay, whether it's like
Speaker 3: because you're getting attention, you look more unique or something
Speaker 3: about it. Mary puts on a turban and pretends to
Speaker 3: be French as a beggar. But then they take her
Speaker 3: to the French console and she doesn't actually speak all
Speaker 3: that well, and so she pretends to be Spanish, and
Speaker 3: then at the French console they're like, oh, we have
Speaker 3: a cookoo Spanish. Hold on one second, and then she's
Speaker 3: like wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, just kidding. And
Speaker 3: I think this is probably the point where she realizes
Speaker 3: that if she's going to fake an ethnicity, she needs
Speaker 3: one that no one can call.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So then that's I think how the Princess Caribou
Speaker 3: situation began. We can kind of assume that the Portuguese
Speaker 3: guy was in on it.
Speaker 2: It sounds like, yeah, she maybe not from the beginning,
Speaker 2: but maybe she like met him and was like you
Speaker 2: want to tell people?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay. I mean we don't have any information on that.
Speaker 3: We don't know what their relationship was, but it kind
Speaker 3: of reading between the lines, like I assumed she would
Speaker 3: just like go along with this, well, ITT's have fun
Speaker 3: and again, pretty young girl, so I think more people
Speaker 3: were willing to go along with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so is that how it ended was when this
Speaker 2: woman like outed her after seeing her in the paper.
Speaker 1: Well, so once she.
Speaker 3: Sort of outed and again I think this woman also
Speaker 3: outed her in a very polite way.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like it was a real like cancel
Speaker 1: culture way. She was just like, oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: I know her. She used to talk Gibberish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the language was sort of now they realized it's
Speaker 3: a combination of Gibberish and Romani words. And technically, because
Speaker 3: this is right after the Napoleonic War and imposting was
Speaker 3: an actual crime under British law. But I mean because
Speaker 3: they're scared of spies during the war, so like you're
Speaker 3: not allowed to be an impostor, so what she's doing
Speaker 3: is against the law, but she isn't punished, which is
Speaker 3: like kind of cool. And what really happened the person
Speaker 3: too pretty, But really it was just like, well, this
Speaker 3: was all in good fun. And who everyone makes fun
Speaker 3: of of is sort of the Bristol elites for believing
Speaker 3: that they were hosting a princess. Oh yes, like look
Speaker 3: at these stupid rich people in Bristol who were so
Speaker 3: amused and like patting themselves on the back for having
Speaker 3: a royal guest.
Speaker 1: It's like when you.
Speaker 2: See roundups of really really drunk people who thought they
Speaker 2: about celebrities. Yeah, and it's just someone who took a
Speaker 2: picture with like a redheaded guy and was like I
Speaker 2: met Ed Sheeran, and it's like it's.
Speaker 3: Not that's it exactly. Everyone is laughing at the people
Speaker 3: around her and like kind of give her a pass.
Speaker 3: I think mister Nora, mister Worrel's bank collapses, probably because
Speaker 3: everyone's like, oh, yeah, this guy's terrible judgment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wouldn't trust him with my money.
Speaker 3: No, and again maybe he's a cruel drunk. According to
Speaker 3: some sources, Missus Worrel, his wife, who was born in America,
Speaker 3: I think, feels bad because there's a lot of negative
Speaker 3: publicity around Mary now and arranges for her to travel
Speaker 3: to Philadelphia, possibly to escape the back. Basically, once she
Speaker 3: comes to America, she starts a show. She becomes like
Speaker 3: a performer, a very pt Barnum style, but a little earlier.
Speaker 3: And so some of the things that she says I
Speaker 3: will say are not true because she is saying them
Speaker 3: on stage. But according to lore, allegedly when she was
Speaker 3: on the ship to America, a storm blew her off course,
Speaker 3: and they came so close to Saint Helena, where Napoleon
Speaker 3: was being held captive, that she took a small boat
Speaker 3: and rowed it on shore and met him, and he
Speaker 3: was enchanted by her and possibly became his mistress. Oh funny,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe not? Yeah, probably not no no no liar
Speaker 3: tells Storyeh, but amusing. So in the US, she tries
Speaker 3: to kind of capitalize on her fame and appear on
Speaker 3: stage as caribou. The thinking is that Americans are still
Speaker 3: smarting from the War of eighteen twelve, and so the
Speaker 3: idea like, oh, aren't you going to be entertained by
Speaker 3: this woman who fooled these dumb British people. And I
Speaker 3: also kind of think it's interesting how nowadays if someone
Speaker 3: is like quote unquote canceled, they kind of do their
Speaker 3: like villain arc tour. Yes, and the way they try
Speaker 3: to capitalize on that notoriety for money and public with
Speaker 3: that publicity is happening one hundred years two hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you would just like write a tell all book. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this is this is her tell all, This is her
Speaker 3: tell her going on call her daddy, She's going on
Speaker 3: call her daddy, except she's going on the Philadelphia stage.
Speaker 3: She writes a letter back to the worlds saying that
Speaker 3: it's really hard to be a celebrity, just like her notoriety.
Speaker 3: Like it's not like, oh, it's so hard to be famous,
Speaker 3: but like it's very uncomfortable the way ever knows me,
Speaker 3: I don't like living here. And in eighteen twenty four,
Speaker 3: so a handful of years later, she comes back to Britain,
Speaker 3: and then her life becomes pretty normal. In eighteen twenty eight,
Speaker 3: she's living at a widow which is possibly not true.
Speaker 3: Maybe she just is living as a widow with the
Speaker 3: last name of a cousin, Mary Burgess, so it seems
Speaker 3: like she just sort of took on a fake name
Speaker 3: to avoid the notoriety. From all of this, she marries
Speaker 3: a man named Richard Baker, which is why sometimes if
Speaker 3: you see stories about her, she's referenced as Mary Baker.
Speaker 3: She gives birth to a daughter, Mary Anne, and in
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty nine, so a little over a decade after
Speaker 3: all of this, she's making a living selling leeches to
Speaker 3: a eighteen twenty nine, eighteen twenty nine, Thank you. Eighteen
Speaker 3: twenty nine, she is making a living selling leeches to
Speaker 3: the Bristol Infirmary Hospital, which is a thing that you
Speaker 3: need to do. Yeah, these hospitals need leeches. They gotta
Speaker 3: get them for the blood in the humors. Someone has
Speaker 3: to collect those leeches. And apparently she's making a respectable living,
Speaker 3: but she is still embarrassed about her notoriety. Children would
Speaker 3: run after her, calling caribou. It's kind of like when
Speaker 3: a person who was on a sitcom then like works
Speaker 3: at Trader Joe's. Yes, because she's just do She's just
Speaker 3: the leech lady. She's just trying to have a respectable
Speaker 3: job with her husband and child. But that kind of
Speaker 3: embarrassment of this youthful summer is by all accounts, making
Speaker 3: her very uncomfortable. But she lives until her seventies. She
Speaker 3: dies around seventy two or seventy three years old and
Speaker 3: Christmas Eve buried in Bristol and unmarked grave because they
Speaker 3: were very poor. And then this is like the very
Speaker 3: sad part about her story is her daughter takes up
Speaker 3: the family leech business and lives alone with a bunch
Speaker 3: of cats for the rest of her life until she
Speaker 3: dies in a fire in nineteen hundred.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: Congrats on having a lot of cats. We love cats.
Speaker 1: We love cats. That's very sad.
Speaker 3: It just is a very strange, sad, anticlimactic ending again
Speaker 3: because she lives for decades after where it's like she
Speaker 3: really shined very bright this summer where she was in
Speaker 3: the news and on everyone's lips and then tried to
Speaker 3: capitalize on it in this show and knew in America
Speaker 3: that wasn't that successful, came back and tried to live
Speaker 3: a normal life, was sort of haunted by her reputation,
Speaker 3: and then did the best she could.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it a little bit.
Speaker 2: I mean I think that taking advantage of stereotypes aside,
Speaker 2: I find her quote unquote crime like mostly harmless.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like that kind of fun.
Speaker 3: She's also not imitating a specific racial group. She's speaking nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But what it a little bit reminds me of is
Speaker 2: like there's a comedian an actor like lied about surviving
Speaker 2: nine to eleven and like that is just all he's ever.
Speaker 1: Going to be known for. Yeah, and like it's just done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the nine to eleven guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that's it, and like whatever boost he got
Speaker 2: from that is completely I hope he enjoyed, like whatever
Speaker 2: auditions that anecdote got him.
Speaker 1: But is over and again.
Speaker 3: It's like, this is a woman who was possibly mentally ill,
Speaker 3: I mean, suffered from mental issues after her rheumatism when
Speaker 3: she was a child, who was impoverished for her entire life.
Speaker 3: I'm not here to like cancel this poor woman who
Speaker 3: was a beggar for most of her life. I think
Speaker 3: the larger issue to examine is that she was like
Speaker 3: a symptom of this nineteenth century British obsession with Eastern exoticism,
Speaker 3: and they were so amused by what was so obviously
Speaker 3: a fraud because they wanted to believe it. I read
Speaker 3: a few scholarly articles about this and this Historian Matthew
Speaker 3: Isaac Cohen wrote an article about British performances of Java
Speaker 3: eighteen eleven to eighteen twenty two, and specifically he wrote
Speaker 3: about those years because not to get too deep into history,
Speaker 3: but I've heard of like the East Indies, Dutch East Indies,
Speaker 3: the Dutch college those islands, and then England colonized those
Speaker 3: islands and then they went back. So this was like
Speaker 3: a period right after British colonization of the Indies. And
Speaker 3: he wrote that her performance offered quote a ground for
Speaker 3: imperial fantasy. I'm just going to quote what he says,
Speaker 3: which is a theatricalized front to a British audience that
Speaker 3: was keen to believe in the possibility of the other
Speaker 3: coexisting in their midst a representative of a foreign culture
Speaker 3: who was both totally unlike them and also not so
Speaker 3: distinct as to cause offense. It's like the perfect version
Speaker 3: of an quote unquote other, which is like, it's not
Speaker 3: too many people, You're not gonna over You're still my immigration,
Speaker 3: not immigration, it's just one quirky princess who happens to
Speaker 3: be like a beautiful young woman doing fun things for
Speaker 3: our amusement.
Speaker 1: Sex.
Speaker 2: They couldn't treat Megan Markle like that. Oh gosh, she
Speaker 2: should have been quirkier.
Speaker 1: You know they you know, they treat like that. As
Speaker 1: Aria Baldwin realized this, oh my god, I would look
Speaker 1: I mean Laria Baldwin episode when I.
Speaker 3: Mean, yeah, let's not get too deep into this, but
Speaker 3: Alaria is doing a Princess Caribou. She realizes you get
Speaker 3: more attention somewhere.
Speaker 2: Between Ilaria Baldwin and like Rachel Dole was all yeah,
Speaker 2: because it's like clearly she's not doing it.
Speaker 1: To fit in with a real group of people. She's
Speaker 1: just doing it for attention, and.
Speaker 3: She's fully just Again, this is she's not pretending to
Speaker 3: be a specific culture. She's saying she's from a made
Speaker 3: up place and speaking a gibberish language.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she is definitely.
Speaker 3: Using exoticized trappings of Romani people and East Asian people,
Speaker 3: but she's not doing she's specifically imitating a group that
Speaker 3: no one else is a part of.
Speaker 2: Really, what this more so reminds me of is like
Speaker 2: singers who pretend to be really poor growing up, or
Speaker 2: like you know what I mean, or like how I mean.
Speaker 2: We talk all the time about how artists always have
Speaker 2: to imbell their backstories and present themselves as like really
Speaker 2: unusual and coming from some unexpected place when it's like, no,
Speaker 2: you just like went to Idlewild.
Speaker 1: Yeah you don't. No one wants to be an artist
Speaker 1: who grew up in Brentwood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's like you could get a bunch of
Speaker 2: face tattoos and now you're interesting and different and we
Speaker 2: want to listen to you rap.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's the interesting thing is like she knew
Speaker 3: as a beggar that she would get more attention by
Speaker 3: being distinct and different, and she was completely correct. She
Speaker 3: became so famous in this one summer that we are
Speaker 3: still talking about her. Yeah, and I think that the
Speaker 3: person who should like be in trouble, the bad guy
Speaker 3: of this episode isn't necessarily her. It's the system that
Speaker 3: did that. What I kind of find interesting is there's
Speaker 3: been like a slate of projects where she's sort of
Speaker 3: just the ngenu, not even like an unlikable female character.
Speaker 3: Like there's a nineteen ninety four movie starring.
Speaker 2: Phoebe Kates that is such good casting.
Speaker 1: Well here's not also really interesting thing. Kates is half
Speaker 1: Chinese Filipino.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because she's a little bit ethnically ambiguous. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: also just like a dropped dead hotti.
Speaker 3: Dropped dead hottie. No one talked about the fact that
Speaker 3: she was, you know, East Asian when they were making
Speaker 3: that movie.
Speaker 1: That was not relevant.
Speaker 2: She was just read she was in a ninety Just
Speaker 2: say she reads ethnically ambiguous. I'm not saying that Phoebe
Speaker 2: Kate's herself is just like an ambiguous blob in the world.
Speaker 3: No, But I think what's interesting is obviously she's like
Speaker 3: a real person nineties, Phoebe Kates was just white.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's just like you see her, You're like white lady. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But what I do find interesting is the fact that
Speaker 3: she actually is closer to what quote unquote Caribou was
Speaker 3: pretending to be. This is, by all accounts, not a
Speaker 3: very good movie. You can watch a trailer.
Speaker 1: I watched a trailer for it on YouTube.
Speaker 3: Apparently Laura Bonanti, not ethnically ambiguous, to the best of
Speaker 3: my knowledge, hosted a workshop for a musical version in
Speaker 3: two thousand and four, and then in twenty sixteen there
Speaker 3: was an off West It's then musical about her amazing,
Speaker 3: which I kind of do feel like, maybe.
Speaker 2: Maybe the Brits need to reckon with this a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm like the nineteen ninety four version. I read
Speaker 3: the Wikipedia and I watched the trailer. I did not
Speaker 3: watch the movie because my time is very limited. But
Speaker 3: it's very much sort of like a fairy tale version
Speaker 3: of this story where there's kind of no bad guys. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's absolutely not reckoning with like racial othering. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's just not what that movie is about. But I
Speaker 3: do think there is if you are going to make
Speaker 3: a piece of art about Princess Caribou. That does seem
Speaker 3: to be the thing that you need to touch on,
Speaker 3: because otherwise there's just not a lot of there. There's yea,
Speaker 3: it is just quirky that a random girl put on
Speaker 3: a turban and started acting insane and an entire town
Speaker 3: fell in love with her and she became an international
Speaker 3: news story. Yeah, that's so funny because she was a princess. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean you also wonder how long did she think
Speaker 3: she was going to pull this off?
Speaker 2: Also, like what was the like, girl, you gotta stash
Speaker 2: away your money, Like, well, you know what, you got
Speaker 2: to have an exit plan.
Speaker 3: You know what the exit plan should have been if
Speaker 3: I were get married. You have to you have to
Speaker 3: phase out the accent.
Speaker 1: Have you seen that ross on Friends? Many times? If
Speaker 1: you start with an accent, you have to phase it out.
Speaker 3: I mean, she quote unquote learns English, she learns English,
Speaker 3: stops talking in an accent. And then in like a year,
Speaker 3: you just people forget that you are the missing princess
Speaker 3: and you're like, oh, yes, my ancestry is quite exotic.
Speaker 1: And then you marry a rich guy. Yeah, marry a
Speaker 1: rich guy that would have I guess been my plan
Speaker 1: if I had been forced into a Cariboo situation. But
Speaker 1: she really it was.
Speaker 3: This con did not last long. I mean it lasted
Speaker 3: about two months. Special Summer, one special summer, one amazing
Speaker 3: wild summer.
Speaker 1: That is the story of Princess Cariboo.
Speaker 3: A story about how we love sexy dumb ladies or
Speaker 3: foreignlyan or smart smart like possibly smart ladies acting very
Speaker 3: dumb and childlike.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Lizzie Logan, where can the good people find you?
Speaker 2: You can talk to us at Hooks the Podcast on Instagram.
Speaker 1: We love chatting. We love chatting.
Speaker 2: Follow us, Yeah, go ahead, do it doesn't hurt.
Speaker 1: And Dana, what about you? Hooks Thepodcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 3: I will get to your emails sometimes a little slowly,
Speaker 3: but I do read all the emails. And Dana Schwartz
Speaker 3: on Instagram and TikTok with three z's, and I will
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Speaker 2: Please hoax responsibly Bye. Poax is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: Our hosts are Danas Schwortz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive
Speaker 2: producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer
Speaker 2: Rima L. Kali and producers Nomes Griffin and Jesse Funk.
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