SPEAKER_00 0:17

If history has a margin, this is where it lives. I'm Wendell Marchant, and this is the footnote. A magistrate's parlor in Gloucestershire, April 1817. A young woman is seated in a chair, a turban wound about her head, her feet bare on a Persian rug. Around her, the local gentry, a clergyman, two physicians, and a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Ineso, who has been pulled in off the Bristol docks because he claims to know her tongue. She speaks. He listens. He turns to the room and reports that the lady is a princess, a caribou by name, daughter of a man of high station on the island of Javasu, somewhere east of Sumatra, that she was taken by pirates, sold, transported, escaped at last by swimming for the English coast. The room nods. Tea is sent for. Within a week, her portrait will hang in a Bristol parlor. Within a month, the Bath Chronicle will be running paragraphs on her diet and her swimming habits. Within ten weeks, a respectable Bristol matron named Neil will pick up the same paper, look at the engraving, set down her cup, and say, That is the cobbler's daughter who used to lodge with me. That is Mary Baker of Witheridge Devon, who has never been further east than the Turnpike at Maidenhead. This is the story of Princess Caribou, which is also, I think, the story of how badly the English county families of 1817 wanted there to be a Princess Caribou. I do not think it is a story about a clever swindler. I think it is a story about a tired woman with an ear for languages and a country gentry whose appetite for the exotic had, that spring, outrun their judgment by a margin that would have been comic if it hadn't ended where it ended, which I will get to. Let me set the scene properly. Almondsbury is a village about ten miles north of Bristol. In April of eighteen seventeen, on the evening of the third, Felix Farley's Bristol Journal would later place it Thursday week, a young woman knocked on the door of a cottage near the village green and asked, in some manner, for a bed. She did not speak English. She did not, so far as the cottager could tell, speak French or German either. She wore a black stuffed gown, a black shawl wound about her head in the manner of a turban, and leather shoes that did not look English. She carried a small bundle. She was, by the estimate of the local doctor who would shortly examine her, somewhere between twenty and twenty five years old. Her complex her complexion was described by the Bristol Mirror, with that period's straightforwardness about such matters, as somewhat dark, though not, the paper hastened to add, in a manner suggesting African ancestry. The cottager could not house her. She referred the woman to the overseer of the poor. The overseer, who had no idea what to do with a stranger who could not be questioned, walked her up the lane to Knoll Park, the country house of Samuel Warrell, Esquire, magistrate of Gloucestershire and partner in a Bristol bank. Mr. Warrell was, I gather, a busy man. He had a sense of what vagrance looked like and a sense of what fraud looked like, and his first instinct was that this young woman was probably one or the other. He told his wife as much. Mrs. Warrell, Elizabeth, disagreed. Mrs. Warrell thought the woman's bearing was inconsistent with imposture. The woman did not seem to recognize the words bread or water or bed, but when shown a pineapple in the dining room, she walked over to it and bowed. When asked her name through a series of gestures, she pointed to herself and said, Caribou. This, the Warrels would later say in print, was the beginning of their belief. Mrs. Warrell sent for the vicar. The vicar sent for the doctor. The doctor sent to Bristol for someone, anyone, who might know the language. And while they waited, the woman was lodged in an upstairs bedroom at Knoll Park, where she behaved, by all accounts, in a manner consistent with what the eighteen seventeen English imagination thought a foreign princess ought to do. She refused meat, she drank only tea and water. She slept on the floor instead of in the bed. She prayed each evening to a deity she called Alla Tala, kneeling on a cushion oriented in what she insisted was the proper direction, though the direction shifted by about thirty degrees over the course of the week. She bathed every morning in a pond on the estate, naked, and when one of the gardeners blundered into view, she scolded him in her tongue with a fluency the Warrels considered authoritative. She rode horses bareback. She fenced with one of the footmen using a borrowed sword. She climbed a tree. She produced, on request, a series of marks on a slate that the Bath Chronicle would later describe as resembling no known alphabet, though it bore, the paper noted, with what I read as a faint editorial cough, a passing similarity to the kind of squiggles a clever person might invent. A linguist was brought from Oxford. He could not place the tongue. A merchant with East India connections was brought from Bristol. He could not place it either. The Bristol papers, to their credit, were skeptical from early on. Felix Farley's Bristol Journal ran a paragraph in late April observing that the language exhibited none of the structural features one would expect of a Malay or Javanese dialect. The paper did not, however, accuse her of imposture. It merely noted that the question remained open. And then Manuel Ineso walked into the parlor. Manuel Ineso was a Portuguese sailor of, I am told, somewhat indefinite biography, who had spent time in the East Indies and was, at that moment, on the Bristol docks looking for a berth. Word had reached him through the harbor that a gentleman in the country was paying for translators. He came up. He sat with the woman for half an hour. He emerged with a story. The story, which the Bath Chronicle printed in full over the course of three issues that May, was the following. Princess Caribou was the daughter of a man of high station, variously translated as a prince, a chieftain, a ruler, on the island of Javasu, which Ineso placed somewhere off Sumatra. Her mother, a Malay, had died. Her father had remarried. The princess was sailing in the company of attendants when her ship was boarded by pirates, the attendants killed, and she herself taken aboard a brig that crossed three oceans before depositing her, after she escaped by leaping overboard, in the Bristol Channel. She had swum to the English shore. She had walked north. She had arrived at Almondsbury. This was a story with a number of moving parts, several of which were, on later inspection, structurally impossible. The geography of Javasu did not survive the consultation of an atlas. The chronology of the pirate brig did not survive the consultation of a tide table. The Bristol Journal noted dryly that the princess's swimming abilities, while impressive, did not appear to extend to the crossing of the Atlantic. But none of this mattered, in the parlors of Gloucestershire, for the simple reason that Manuel Ineso had spoken. A translator had been produced. The translator had confirmed the tale. The tale was now, in the parlance of the period, authenticated. And what followed was perhaps the most instructive part of the whole affair, which was the Ten Week Salon. Mrs. Warrell took Princess Caribou to Bath. She took her to dinners, she took her to assemblies. She took her to the home of Hannah Moore, the religious writer, who was much impressed by the princess's piety, though she observed in a letter to a niece that the princess's prayers seemed to be conducted in a tongue she could not identify with any of the Eastern languages she had encountered in missionary correspondence. The Bristol Mirror reported in late May that the princess had sat for a portrait. The portrait was painted by Edward Byrd, a Bristol artist of some local reputation. It showed her in costume, with bare arms, holding what the painter described as a ceremonial bow. Engravings were struck. They sold. The princess's costume, turban, shawl, sandals, was copied by Bath dressmakers. There were, briefly that summer, caribou bonnets on sale in Milsom Street. I want to pause here for a moment, because this is the part that has always struck me as the most revealing. She had not asked for any of this. She had asked, on the evening of April the third, for a bed. She had been given a turban, a portrait, a salon circuit, and an invented language that she now had to keep up under the scrutiny of Oxford Dawn's. The performance, by the end of May, was no longer hers to control. It was being controlled by the people who had decided to believe her. And those people had a powerful interest in continuing to believe. Consider the Warrels. Samuel Warrell had been initially skeptical. By the second week of May, he was hosting visitors who came to see the princess at Knoll. He was being written about in the Morning Post of London. He was, in the language of our own century, a curator of distinction. To admit that the princess was a Devon shoemaker's daughter would be to confess that he, magistrate of Gloucestershire and partner in a Bristol bank, had been credulous. He could not afford the admission. So he extended the credulity instead. Consider Mrs. Warrell, who had been the believer from the start. She had defended the princess against her husband's first suspicions. She had taken her into the family. She had introduced her to Hannah Moore. To admit she had been duped was to admit that her instincts about character, instincts on which her standing in Gloucestershire society rested, had failed her catastrophically. She, too, could not afford the admission. Consider the readers of the Bristol Mirror, the Bath Chronicle, Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. They had spent six weeks following the story. They had bought the engravings, they had told their cousins. To learn, at the end of May, that the princess was an imposter would be to admit they had been entertained by a fraud. Easier by a long mile to keep believing. This is what I mean when I say I do not think this is a story about a clever swindler. The swindler is a footnote. The story is about an audience that, having committed to a fantasy, kept extending the credit on which the fantasy ran. The story about a clever swindler. The swindler is a footnote. The story is about an audience that, having committed to a fantasy, kept extending the credit on which the fantasy ran. The reason Caribou lasted ten weeks is not that her invented language was undetectable. It was detectable in the second week by anyone who could be bothered to test it. The reason she lasted ten weeks is that no one in Gloucestershire wanted her detected. The end came when it came by accident. A Mrs. Neal, who kept a lodging house on the old market in Bristol, was reading her copy of the Bristol Journal one morning in early June. She had been following the caribou story with mild interest. The portrait engraving was now in circulation. She looked at it. She set down her tea. She walked over to her husband's chair and said, in effect, I am paraphrasing here, since Felix Farley's Bristol Journal would later report her words in indirect speech rather than direct quotation, that this princess of Javasu was in fact a young woman named Mary Baker, who had lodged in her house for some weeks the previous autumn, who had told stories in an invented language by way of amusing her children, and who came, by her own admission, from a place called Witheridge in Devon, where her father, John Wilcox, made and mended shoes. Mrs. Neal wrote to the Warrels. The Warrels did not believe her at first. That is the measure of how deep the commitment had gone. They wrote back asking for further proof. Mrs. Neal supplied it. Mrs. Warrell traveled to Bristol. Mary Baker was confronted. She did not, by any account I have seen, attempt to maintain the deception. She sat down in Mrs. Neill's parlor and, in clear, Devon accented English, told the truth. She was twenty five years old. She was the daughter of a cobbler and a weaver. She had been in service in various households since she was about thirteen. Exeter, then London, then Bristol, then back to London. She had been ill for a stretch in the years after 1814. She had wandered, she had begged. She had at some point, in a moment of vagrant inspiration, invented the language for the amusement of children in lodging houses. When she had arrived at Almondsbury that April, she said, she had not intended any fraud. She had hoped only for a bed. The fraud had been built around her by the Warrels and the Doctor and the Bath Gentry, and Manuel Inesso, who, the Bristol Journal would dryly note in mid-June, appeared to have vanished from the Bristol docks once it became clear that Princess Caribou was a Devon shoemaker's daughter, and his translation services were no longer in commercial demand. This, I think, is the cleanest evidence that the imposture was a joint production. Inesso did not stick around to defend his translation. The Warrels did not, as far as I can tell, publish the cottage interrogation that had been promised. Hannah Moore did not write a follow-up letter. Edward Byrd's portrait of the princess was not, so far as I have been able to trace, repainted as a portrait of the cobbler's daughter. The whole edifice, once Mrs. Neal spoke, simply went quiet, in the way that a parlor goes quiet when a guest has said something embarrassing, and the hostess decides not to acknowledge it. Mrs. Warrell, to her credit, did not throw Mary Baker into the street. The English law of 1817 would have permitted her to do considerably worse than that. Vagrancy was a transportable offense, and impersonation of a foreigner for the purpose of obtaining shelter was, technically, fraud. Mrs. Warrell paid for her passage to Philadelphia. The reasoning, I gather, was partly humanitarian and partly cosmetic. Out of sight, out of paragraph. Mary Baker sailed from Bristol on the Robert and Anne in late June of 1817, bound, the records say, for Philadelphia by way of St. Helena, where her ship called for water at the same anchorage that was at that moment holding Napoleon Bonaparte in exile. I want to dwell on that for a moment, because it is the kind of footnote that footnotes love. Mary Baker, the cobbler's daughter from Devon, was for some hours in 1817 anchored in the roads of St. Helena, while the most famous prisoner in the world was held a few miles inland. The account in the Bristol Mirror of October that year reported, on the authority of a passenger from the Robert and Anne, that Napoleon was shown her portrait, asked who she was, and was either amused or charmed. The accounts diverge on this point, and I do not believe either of them. I do not believe Napoleon was shown her portrait. I do not believe he commented. I believe the passenger on the Robert and Anne invented the encounter for the price of a brandy in a Bristol tavern. But the story was printed, and the story spread, and by the spring of 1818 there were broadsides in London showing Princess Caribou curtsying to the Emperor on the lawn at Longwood. The fiction, in other words, did not stop when she sailed. The fiction outlived her. What happened in America is unclear to me. There are reports in the American papers of late 1817 and early 1818 of a young Englishwoman exhibiting herself in Philadelphia under the name Princess Caribou and charging admission. But the reports are thin, and I am not confident the Philadelphia woman was the same person as the Almondsbury woman. Mary Baker was back in England by 1821. She tried, briefly, to exhibit herself in London at a venue on New Bond Street. The takings were poor. The London public of 1821 had already had its caribou summer. It was not in the market for the sequel. She drifted out of the papers. She married a man named Baker in 1828, by which time she was supplying leeches to the Bristol infirmary. She died in 1864 in a Bristol almshouse. Her grave at Hebron Road Cemetery in the city is, as far as I know, unmarked. That is the story. I want to spend the back half of this episode on what I think it means, because I keep coming back to it. And what brings me back is not the imposture, but the audience. Look at the same summer, June of 1817, while the Bristol Papers are working out what to do with Princess Caribou, the American papers are working out what to do with another problem of credulity. I have in front of me the Daily National Intelligencer of Washington City, dated the 26th of August, 1817. The front matter is occupied by sketches of Louisiana. The back of the page carries dispatches from the English press and a long item titled in capitals The Sea Monster. It is the Cape Anne Sea Serpent Affair. The Cape Ann Sea Serpent, for those who have not had occasion to look it up, was a creature reported through the summer of 1817 by fishermen, sea captains, and respectable gentlemen of Gloucester, Massachusetts, not Gloucestershire, England, though one notes the coincidence. The intelligencer reproduces an earlier account from a Captain Crabtree of Penobscot, who claimed to have seen, in June of 1793, an enormous serpent off Mount Desert Island. The captain estimated its length at between 55 and 60 feet. He observed, in language that the intelligencer prints verbatim, that the eyes were perfect black, sharp and piercing. He noted that the body was about the size of a barrel in circumference. He stated, with the kind of qualification that I find more endearing than disqualifying, that, according to the most accurate computation which he made in his mind of the creature's length, he judged it could not be less than from 55 to 60 feet. A second witness, reported in the same column, placed the Glaustra creature at as much as 150 feet in length, and as big round as a barrel. That is the paper's phrasing, and added that he was likely cased in shell. The intelligencer reports, without comment, that several strong nets were being constructed in hopes of entangling him. The paper closes by noting, in a sentence I find irresistible, that these animals are very rare. These animals are very rare. The point is not that the Daily National Intelligencer was a credulous paper. The point is that the same summer in which an English magistrate's wife was hosting a Javanese princess in Gloucestershire, an American Daily of Record was reporting a hundred and