Princess Caraboo
Mary Baker was an English impostor. Posing as the fictional Princess Caraboo, Baker pretended to come from a far-off island kingdom and fooled a British town for some months.
Biography
On 3 April 1817, a cobbler in Almondsbury in Gloucestershire, England, met an apparently disoriented young woman wearing exotic clothes who was speaking an incomprehensible language. 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, who lived in Knole Park on the estate where Tower House is located. 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 Wikt:nanas, meaning pineapple in Indonesian languages, and insisted on sleeping on the floor. Samuel Worrall declared she was a beggar and should be taken to Bristol and tried for vagrancy.During her imprisonment, a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso said he spoke her language and translated her story. According to Enes, 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. For ten weeks, this representative of exotic royalty was a favourite of the local dignitaries. 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 bringing her national acclaim.
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 and story. The odd marks on her head were scars from a crude cupping operation in a poorhouse hospital in London. 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 which she departed on 28 June 1817.
On 13 September 1817, a letter was printed in the Bristol Journal, allegedly from Sir Hudson Lowe, the official in charge of the exiled Emperor Napoleon on St Helena. It claimed that after the Philadelphia-bound ship bearing the beautiful Caraboo had been driven close to the island by a tempest, the intrepid princess impulsively cut herself adrift in a small boat, rowed ashore and so fascinated the emperor that he was applying to the Pope for a dispensation to marry her. That story is unverified and not credible, given that St Helena is an isolated rock in the South Atlantic, many thousands of miles from the USA.
In the United States, she briefly continued her role, appearing on-stage at the Washington Hall, Philadelphia, as "Princess Caraboo", with little success. Her last contact with the Worralls was in a letter from New York in November 1817, in which she complained of her notoriety. She appears to have returned to Philadelphia until she left America in 1824, returning to England.
In 1824, she returned to Britain and exhibited herself for a short time in New Bond Street, London, as Princess Caraboo but her act was not successful. She may have briefly travelled to France and Spain in her guise, but soon returned to England.