Criminal - The Princess

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

One night in 1817, a woman appeared in the village of Almondsbury, in England. No one could figure out who she was. But everyone wanted to solve the mystery. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Well, once upon a time, one might begin that way, a strange woman turned up in a cottage in a village called Almondsbury, which is several miles outside of the city of Bristol, a very bustling port city at the time. This is Professor Meg Russett. The date is April 3rd, 1817, and she seemed to be speaking a language that no one around her understood. The woman looked to be about 25 years old, with pale skin and dark hair. She was wearing a black dress with a red and black cotton shawl

wrapped around her shoulders and another shawl wrapped around her head. People noticed that her hands were very smooth, like she hadn't been using them for work. She was carrying almost nothing, a small bar of soap and a few English coins. She was first taken to what was called the Overseer of the Poor. The overseer offered her money, but the woman wouldn't take it.

She made it clear that she was very tired and needed a place to sleep. Eventually, she was brought before the local magistrate, Mr. Worrell, who was a very well-to-do landowner in the village. And he couldn't understand her either, but apparently he had a Greek servant, and it was hoped that somehow the Greek servant would be able to speak with her. This didn't turn out to be the case. The woman continued to make it clear she needed to sleep, and eventually Mr. Worrell and his wife decided to get her a room at the village inn. She refused certain foods. She appeared not to know what a bed was for and tried to make up her bedding on the ground.

She only agreed to sleep on the bed after the innkeeper's young daughter climbed on it and showed her how to use it. So all this added to the sense that she was a person who was totally unfamiliar with all English or European customs and ways of life. That she had never seen a bed before, so she wouldn't know that this is what you slept on. Exactly right. At one point, the woman saw an illustration of a pineapple on the wall of the parlor and appeared to get very excited. People in the room thought she was trying to tell them that she recognized pineapples from home. And they started to think that her home must be very far away from the village of Almondsbury. And then various villagers, and increasingly as the word spread, other, you know, curious, busybodies of one sort or another,

you know, tried to engage her in conversation, get to understand her. Mrs. Worrell, the magistrate's wife, visited her at the inn. The woman lit up when she saw her. And Mrs. Worrell decided to take the woman home with her until they could figure out what to do. Mrs. Worrell was an American, somewhat out of place herself, was probably a more curious person, quite frankly, than her husband was.

And she may have felt that she had the wherewithal to kind of care for this person until more was discovered about her. But she did also warn her, apparently quite severely, about the danger of being committed to the workhouse. There were sort of two possible things that could happen to somebody who was caught begging in the, you know, byways of England at that time, if they were determined to be a vagrant, which means that they were essentially homeless, had no visible means of support, etc., they would be taken up before the local authority, could suffer very severe consequences, could be whipped, could be put in the stocks, and eventually would be

dispatched to wherever they were believed to have come from. Meg Russett says the other thing that could happen was that you'd be sentenced to a workhouse. It was tantamount to prison. The work there tended to be extremely menial and difficult, and people were even known to starve to death in the workhouses. So being taken for a vagrant was about the, you know, not quite a fate worse than death, but pretty close. Mrs. Worrell wanted to help the woman, but she was also a little bit suspicious.

She reportedly said to her, My good young woman, I very much fear that you are imposing upon me, and that you understand and can answer me in my own language. If so, and distress has driven you to this expedient, make a friend of me. I am a female as yourself, and can feel for you, and will give you money and clothes, and will put you on your journey,

without disclosing your conduct to anyone. But it must be on condition that you speak the truth. If you deceive me, I think it right to inform you that Mr. Worrell is a magistrate and has the power of sending you to prison. The woman made no sign of recognition or, you know, fear or even understanding when the word workhouse was mentioned. And indeed, she never responded to, you know, words or sentences, questions spoken in English other than by gesticulating or she didn't appear to understand anything that was

asked or said to her. So it seems as though the magistrate's wife was kind of saying, hey, level with me. I'm not going to get you in trouble, but you're going to get yourself in trouble. Let's figure out exactly what's going on here. Mrs. Worrell wrote her own name down on a piece of paper and showed it to her. She said her name, Elizabeth Worrell, a few times and tried to give the pen and paper to the woman, indicating that she should do the same. But the woman just shook her head. And then she pointed to herself and said, caribou. And that's what she came to be called. The Worrells took the woman to the mayor to see if he might know what to do with her.

But he couldn't figure out where she might have come from or who she could be either. So she was committed to St. Peter's Hospital, a home for poor residents of the city. She wouldn't touch any of the food there, and she refused to sleep in the beds. Mrs. Worrell couldn't stand it. She came to pick her up.

People came to visit and introduce themselves. People who had traveled outside of England were especially eager to meet her and try to determine what language she was speaking. Some visitors thought she could be speaking Greek. Others thought Turkish. Some people thought she was speaking a dialect of Chinese. At one point, a sailor came to visit. And emerged from that with the information that she was a person of consequence who had, from her native country, which he described as being near Sumatra, and that she had been kidnapped and brought all the way, you know,

to the coast of England where she had managed a kind of miraculous escape. The sailor's story planted a seed, and as new visitors would arrive to meet her, they would add on to it. Her name was Karabu. She was the princess of an island called Jabesu, which it came to be believed was somewhere near Malaysia. Her father was Chinese, her mother was Malaysian, and one day she was out sort of with her ladies-in-waiting

doing something on the beach, and a pirate captain named Tapabu captured her and abducted her to his pirate brig, and then they went sailing sort of all over the place. Actually, a map was reconstructed of the, you know, a rough map of her travels all over the world. Until finally she made her way to the coast of Bristol where she was able somehow to elude her captors

and to jump into the ocean close enough to the coast that she could swim to shore. When someone showed her illustrations of flags from various countries' ports and asked her to point to any that looked familiar, she closed her eyes and shook her head. People said this must mean she'd been held prisoner, below deck, where she couldn't see anything at all. And so when the Worrells hear the story of this woman, of this princess who's gone through this terrible ordeal, they ask her to stay. Mm-hmm. They moved her into their enormous estate. It was called Knoll Park.

But this woman was not a princess. Her name was Mary Baker, and she'd grown up about 80 miles down the road. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Who was Mary Baker? Tell me about this woman growing up. Who was this woman? She had been born into a family who I believe they were, the father was a cobbler

and no doubt a very small-time farmer as one was at the time in a village called Witheridge in Devonshire. And they seemed to have been, you know, poor in a dire way. And she had been a sort of a wild girl in her youth, apparently. She was, you know, she was very athletic. She loved to play boys' games, hang out with boys. And she was sort of unmanageable.

And at some point, either her parents kind of, you know, shoved her along her way or she just left and made her way to London where she worked as a servant in a few different households. And, you know, kind of picked up various things while she was at it. At one of her places of employment, she learned how to read, at least in a rudimentary way. Eventually, she lost what I believe was the last of her servant jobs because she set fire to a bed and, not surprisingly, was kicked out after that. But she was known for entertaining small children with kind of wild stories about herself and places that she'd visited and so forth. Anyway, so she takes up this wandering life. She committed herself to the Magdalene House, which was a sort of reformatory for prostitutes who were trying to, you know, sort of change their way of life.

But eventually she was kicked out of there too because she hadn't been a prostitute. So she, you know, really kind of had nowhere to go once she'd, you know, once she'd kind of fallen below the servant class, she was in no class. And she, you know, wandered around the country doing sort of odd jobs, falling in with different, you know, rogues and ruffians. She seems to have fallen in with a kind of, you know, band of, you know, robbers at one point. So she was wandering from place to place without much, you know, without really any prospects, kind of learning all the way in the hardscrabble, you know, school of life. So why not try something else? You know, what's to lose? What are the options?

A local journalist named John Matthew Gutsch was the editor of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. He wrote an account of Mary Baker's hoax. It was published in 1817. In it, he wrote that she got the idea to pretend she didn't speak English after encountering a group of French lacemakers from Normandy. Who had established a kind of lacemaking factory outside of Bristol. And she noticed that they had an unusual headdress and that they were attracting a lot of Bristol. And she noticed that, you know, they had an unusual headdress

and that they were attracting a lot of attention, you know, from passersby, either because, you know, they were dressed differently, they spoke differently. So they were, you know, their visible foreignness made them into a spectacle that she seems not to have felt that she was, as a kind of runaway servant, vagrant beggar, she wasn't glamorous enough to be interesting. And whatever she was first imagining herself doing, maybe she was trying to be taken for French. But after all, plenty of people could speak French, so that wasn't going to work for very long. So she kept kind of riffing, elaborating to elude exposure. We'll be right back.

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The whole performance seems to have started for her, maybe not exactly on a lark, but without a whole lot of premeditation. You know, did she expect to be taken for anyone in particular? I don't think so. I think she was probably, you know, trying to avoid being consigned to the workhouse. But it seems to have been kind of in everybody's interest to have a great story about her. It made Mrs. Worrell feel important that she was hosting the princess of this island, you know, Javasu. In 1817, a lot of what the visitors

coming to the Worrells' house to see this princess might have known about the world east of Europe came from literature, vague, romanticized descriptions of the so-called Orient. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kublai Khan was published one year before. Lord Byron's work, that came to be known as his Turkish Tales or Oriental Tales, was incredibly popular at this time.

He's been called the most fashionable poet of the early 1800s. And so people who wanted to be seen as fashionable, well-read, and worldly, weren't willing to say out loud to one another, are we sure Javasu is a real place? People brought illustrations and objects for her to identify, and they kept going back over the biggest clue they had, the sailor, Manuel Ineso's story,

about how the princess had arrived. Ineso, you know, seems to have been a bit of a rogue who probably thought that he could kind of, you know, ride on the coattails of this person's celebrity by making up a story that would sound good enough. You know, and so whether she somehow gave him to understand by gestures or, you know, or pictures or something that there was a pirate who had abducted her, or whether this was what he kind of thought would be a great story, and she then kind of went along with it. She did everything she could to keep people thinking that she was the lost princess they all believed her to be, and not Mary Baker from down the road. Well, every time she saw a body of water, she would jump right into it and swim very vigorously.

This was not something that European young ladies did. She would sing songs that, you know, in her own language. She cooked, she hunted her own pigeon and made a, made a curry out of it. And apparently, you know, someone tried it and said that it tasted very good. So, so she seems to have done everything she could, both to show off these real skills that she had. I mean, how many, you know, young English women knew how to swim, you know, or, you know, could shoot a bow and, you know, with a bow and arrow and hit something. She carried around a dagger tucked into some sash on her dress. She actually fought Mr. Worrell. They had a kind of mock duel with daggers or swords in which she apparently

trounced him. So she was probably having a ball. And all this time, she was living in the Worrell's mansion. The Worrells had a quite extensive library, and she was given free access to all their books, a lot of which were large, expensively produced picture books, many of them travelogues, you know, Captain Cook's Voyages, you know, which both described and also pictorially depicted Tahiti, the costumes of Tahiti, the customs of Tahiti. Samuel Raffles's book on Sumatra, which had just been published, she'd probably never seen so many books in her life. And so since she could read English, though it's not clear how well, and she certainly understood spoken English, and she could look at all these pictures all she wanted to, she could, you know, get ideas.

You know, what did a dagger look like? You know, what would a woman of consequence from Sumatra or Tahiti wear? What would she carry around? How would she, you know, how would she comport herself? And then all the visitors who came to the Wurrells in sort of hope of solving the mystery themselves brought their own preconceptions with them, their own information or, of course, from her interviewers who, because they believed she couldn't understand English because she didn't betray any knowledge of English, they would, you know, feel quite free to sort of discuss right in front of her face what sort of did and didn't make sense as far as what they thought they knew. They would bring her things to look at and to identify, little, you know, commodities that came from various parts of Asia, you know, a piece of China,

you know, a fancy comb, Indian ink, you know, whatever the case might be. And she knew perfectly well what they were because they, you know, their names said what they were. Indian ink, surprising, comes from India, right? And it seems as though kind of her method was to sort of say yes, you know, or mentally say yes to every suggestion that was given to her. So she was improvising all the way with a great deal of help from all those who were claiming to find out information about her. So she, you know, she gathered lots of clues this way and also from her earlier sort of vagrant, adventurous life. At one point, she let Mrs. Worrell know that the clothes she'd been wearing in England were not what she was used to wearing, and she designed a new outfit

for herself. The sleeves were long enough to touch the ground. There is a very broad sash around the waist. She was given some fabric to make the outfit herself, so she could wear it around the house. She wore peacock feathers on the side of her head,

and on her feet, sandals without any stockings. And there's a portrait of her made in that costume, which was commissioned by Mrs. Worrell, of the most eminent artist in Bristol, Mr. Bird. Mr. Bird took it upon himself to add some things into the background, like boats and palm trees. And so the more people came to visit, and the more questions they asked, the more they speculated around her, the more she began to present, as it were, as the kind of representative of the habits and customs and costumes and food, etc., that she had grown up with. She even, you know, wrote letters in the character of her native language.

She apparently was very consistent, convincingly consistent in the language that she spoke, so that although no one could identify what it was, They could identify that it had its own internal rules. She never responded, as I mentioned, to questions in English. Even one time when she fell asleep in some company and someone, I guess, tried to startle her awake with an accusatory statement in English. She showed no comprehension. She was not flustered at all. A man came and sort

of paid court to her, saying, you know, you are the most beautiful creature I have ever beheld. You are an angel. She didn't blush. She didn't appear to understand what he was saying. One story goes that one day she overheard the servants talking about how they were going to stay awake at night to see if she said anything in English in her sleep. So that night, she pretended to fall asleep and then started speaking the made-up language. The language she made up was so consistent that her visitors started compiling a vocabulary list of the words she used. She came close to being caught once when she was very sick, and reportedly her cheeks turned red when the doctor said she might die.

But her reaction was dismissed as a symptom of her fever. After she recovered, she wrote a thank-you letter to the doctor who had treated her in her own language. The letter was shared with experts in Bristol and Bath. Some speculated that her language could be related to Javanese, a language spoken in Indonesia. The letter was even sent to Oxford University for analysis. And none of her alphabet didn't correspond with any known language,

though she had been shown a book called Fry's Pantographia, which was a kind of epitome of all the existing alphabets of the world, you know, a kind of glossary and encyclopedia. She may have sort of based some of her letters on that, but she was clever enough that she never pinned herself down as coming from anywhere in particular. And so the mystery deepened the more expertise was brought to bear upon it. Do we know whether she was worried about being caught? She must have been worried about being caught. And partly because of that, she was very vigilant. She was very careful not to break

character, never to do anything out of character with the performance that she'd established. She didn't want to be caught because, of course, she didn't want to be sent to the workhouse. She didn't want to be, you know, denounced as a vagrant. How, you know, how long she imagined keeping it up is a mystery. I think she probably was just kind of spinning it out for as long as she could before maybe she was able, maybe she hoped that she would be able to abscond before,

you know, before the hammer came down. Maybe she hoped she would meet somebody who would sort of take her out of that life. You know, seems like there were a lot of admirers, you know, some of them probably did propose to or at least proposition her. So maybe she was hoping that one of the gallants would sort of turn out to be Prince Charming. One of the experts, so-called, who had been most besotted with her and who'd been a kind of frequent visitor to the Wurlz's mansion

was Mr. Charles Wilkinson, who was a kind of, you know, well-known figure around Bristol. He placed a description of her, you know, kind of a glamorized, you know, missing persons notice in the local paper, Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, in the, you know, in the apparent hope that this would somehow attract the attention of, you know, a scholarly expert who would be able to tell them where she'd actually come from. In his description, he wrote, such is the general effect on all who behold her, that if before suspected as an imposter, the sight of her removes all doubt. It was picked up and published by all the major papers in the UK.

No picture was included in the articles, but Mr. Wilkinson's description was precise enough to catch someone's attention. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway?

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Two months after Mary Baker moved in with the Worrels, they heard from a woman who said she read Dr. Wilkinson's detailed description in the newspaper and recognized the woman. Perhaps because she knew Mary Baker as something of an imaginative troublemaker and sort of, you know, recognized the personality as well as the physical description. She said the woman who had been staying with them was not a princess. She was her former tenant. And at this point, you know, finally Caribou's performance crumbled. One Bristol paper reported, the bubble has at length burst. Miss Caribou proves to be neither more nor less than plain Mary Baker,

the erratic child of honest parents in the humble village of Withridge in the county of Devon. Another paper wrote, The wonderful female who has outwitted the doctor, puzzled the learned, and astonished the multitude, turns out to be a vile imposter. She'd never made a mistake. It was a very, very consistent performance. But after this former landlady denounced her as a kind of, you know, runaway servant called Mary Baker, Mrs. Worrell did what is for me in some ways the most unexpected part of the whole story, which is that instead of washing her hands of her, of this, you know, young woman or kind of burying her own head in the sand because she'd been so embarrassed, she booked her a one-way, you know, transatlantic voyage to America in the hopes that somehow this Mary Baker,

who was a real kind of hard luck case in her ordinary life, would somehow be able to remake herself, reimagine herself in a different country where there was more freedom, more social mobility, where she becomes someone new again. News of Mary Baker reached America just before she did, and by the time she arrived, dozens of articles had been published about her. Some of them included the name of her ship. When the ship pulled into the dock in Philadelphia,

people didn't seem to care if it was all a hoax. They gathered at the dock and asked if the princess was on board. Mary Baker got off the ship wearing a veil that covered her face. According to the 1817 account written by John Matthew Gutsch, Mary Baker didn't seem to feel very guilty. But she did acknowledge that Mrs. Worrell had been very kind to her. She eventually left Philadelphia for New York, and from there, she wrote a letter to Mrs. Worrell,

saying that America is by no means to be compared to England, and the people especially. She's in America for about seven years. And most of that time is a blank as far as the historical record goes. You know, how did she live during that time? I have no idea. She had been, you know, she'd been offered work as a seamstress, I think, and, you know, maybe did it for a little while, didn't like it very much.

But eventually, you know,, hook or by crook, she comes back to Bristol in 1824. And maybe because she's made certain kinds of connections, maybe because she's learned certain skills, she actually sets herself up in business selling leeches to the Bristol Hospital, which is basically being a medical supplier, and makes a fairly decent, you know, lower middle class living for the rest of her life as a businesswoman. She got married and had a daughter and lived in Bristol for the rest of her life.

She died in 1864 at the age of 73. Her daughter, Marianne, took over the leeches business. One of the reasons we know so much about Mary Baker is that shortly after she got caught, Mrs. Worrell asked a friend if she could help her piece together everything she could about who Mary Baker was. Mrs. Worrell's friend traveled around and interviewed people, and she learned from almost everyone that Mary Baker loved to tell stories. As one person put it, odd, unaccountable stories.

Stories which seemed to arise from the love of telling something extraordinary. Today, you can see the Edward Byrd portrait of her that Mrs. Worrell commissioned on display at the Bristol Museum. Thank you. Our technical director is Rob Byers. Engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we'll also have a link to Meg Russett's book, Fictions and Fakes, Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show,

and Instagram, at Criminal underscore Podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

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