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History
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The Curious Case of Princess Caraboo: The Servant Girl Who Fooled a Kingdom
In 1817, Mary Baker, a cobbler's daughter, convinced a British town she was Princess Caraboo from a fictional island. For months, she lived as royalty, speaking a made-up language and enchanting the gentry before a former employer exposed her elaborate and ingenious hoax.
A Mysterious Arrival
In the spring of 1817, the quiet English town of Almondsbury in Gloucestershire was thrown into a state of bewilderment. A young woman appeared, dressed in exotic clothing, speaking a language no one could understand. She was discovered by a local cobbler, and eventually, she found her way into the home of the county magistrate, Samuel Worrall, and his American-born wife, Elizabeth. The woman was beautiful, her mannerisms strange, and her origins a complete mystery. She called herself Caraboo.
This mysterious visitor refused conventional food, drank only water, and performed strange rituals, including praying to a god she called 'Allah-Tallah'. She proved herself to be an expert fencer and skilled with a bow and arrow. The Worralls and the local high society were utterly captivated. Who was this enigmatic woman? Was she royalty? A lost soul from a distant land? The town was desperate for answers.
The Princess of Javasu
The breakthrough came when a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso arrived in town. He claimed he could understand her language and proceeded to translate her incredible story. She was, he declared, Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean. According to Eynesso's translation, she had been captured by pirates, escaped by jumping overboard in the Bristol Channel, and washed ashore in England. Her tale was fantastical, filled with details of a far-off kingdom and a daring escape. The local gentry, enamored with the romanticism of the exotic, accepted her story without question. Princess Caraboo became a sensation. She was lavished with fine clothes, attended parties, and her portrait was painted. Newspapers across the country ran stories about the mysterious foreign royal living in their midst. For ten weeks, she was the toast of British society.
The Unmasking
Fame, however, proved to be a double-edged sword. As her portrait and story circulated in publications like the Bristol Journal, they reached the eyes of someone who knew her not as a princess, but as a servant. A woman named Mrs. Neale, who ran a boarding house in Bristol, recognized the famed princess as one Mary Willcocks (her maiden name), a girl who had previously worked for her. Mrs. Neale traveled to the Worrall's estate and confronted the 'princess'. Faced with her former employer, the exotic royal broke down and confessed everything. Her real name was Mary Baker, a cobbler's daughter from Witheridge, Devon. There was no island of Javasu, no pirates, and no 'Allah-Tallah'. The language she spoke was a gibberish of her own invention, mixed with Romani words she had picked up. The entire story was an elaborate hoax, constructed with stunning creativity and audacity.
The Legacy of a Cobbler's Daughter
Mary Baker's real story was one of hardship. Born into poverty, she had worked as a servant in various houses, wandered the country, and even had a child out of wedlock who died in infancy. Her grand deception was likely an act of desperation—a way to escape the drudgery and powerlessness of her station in a rigid class-based society. The public, surprisingly, was more amused than angered. Her deception had exposed the gullibility and snobbery of the upper class, who were so eager to believe in a romantic fantasy. Instead of prison, Mary briefly enjoyed a new kind of celebrity. She played herself on stage in London and even toured America. Though her fame eventually faded, her story endures as one of history's most fascinating and imaginative impostures. Her biographer, John Mathew Gutch, remarked on her motives:
...a desire of fame, or a wish to live without working, and the pleasure of cheating those who are reputed wise...
Mary Baker, the 'Princess Caraboo', eventually returned to England, married, and lived the rest of her life in relative obscurity, selling leeches to a hospital in Bristol. She died in 1864, leaving behind a legacy not as a princess, but as a clever woman who, for a few brilliant months, created her own kingdom.