Noble Blood - The Beggar Princess of Bristol

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

On April 3, 1817, a strange woman in a turban and ruffled black dress appeared in a small village to the north of Bristol. She would claim to be a Princess from a distant island, and for a summer, she would dazzle and charm an entire town of Englishmen and women all too ready to enjoy a spectacle of the "exotic." Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. In the early hours of the morning on Good Friday in 1817, when the streets, were still dark, but the faintest glow of sunrise was just appearing on the horizon. A strange woman wandered into the village of Almondsbury to the northeast of Bristol. She wore strange, mixed-matched clothes, a heavy black stuff dress with a full fringe at her neck, a red and black shawl, a large black turban covering her dark hair. She looked tired, but still her big

brown eyes were pretty and bright. She had very, very white teeth. A cobbler happened to be outside at dawn, and he saw the woman, or was she a girl, strolling up the main road? He stared at her while she came closer, and then, to his astonishment, she continued to come closer, to approach him. A beggar, he thought, a pretty beggar, but a beggar nonetheless. He waited to hear her appeal for money, but it didn't come. The woman just looked at him and then gestured towards her stomach and her mouth. She said something, but it was in a language he didn't understand. He sighed, it was a stranger and she was hungry.

The least he could do was offer her some food. He invited the woman into his home. By this time, his wife was awake, and the cobbler explained the situation. The cobbler's wife found some people. bread and milk, which the stranger ate hungrily, as if she hadn't eaten in days. The cobbler and his wife watched her as she drained the cup of milk and returned the cup to the table with a satisfied lip smack. She thanked them, at least it seemed like she thanked them in whatever foreign language she spoke, and then she started gesturing that you would

like a place to sleep. The couple exchanged a look. Oh no, the cobbler's wife said. Enough of this. her to the overseer. Mr. Hill was the town overseer of the poor, the man charged with collecting taxes and distributing help to those in need. Like the cobbler and his wife, he was baffled by this young woman who looked to be about 25 in her, well, exotic, get up, a woman who seemed to be unable to understand a single word of English. Mr. Hill decided, not knowing what else to do, that he would bring the girl to Noel Park, the estate let by the town clerk, Samuel Worrell. She doesn't speak any English, it seems, Mr. Hill said. I can't actually tell what language she speaks. Mrs. Worrell listened from the next room. Nothing unusual tended to happen in

Alman'sbury. It was a small village where the most exciting going on of that year was Mr. Worrell trying to start a local Tulsi Bank. But something about this woman aroused equal parts fascination and suspicion. Mr. Hill, Samuel Worrell, and Mrs. Worrell all came into the parlor to try to speak to the woman, to try to understand her story, where she was from, who she was. But it would be another week before her story was discovered. She was a princess from an island called Javasu in the Indian Ocean. She had been kidnapped by pirates, but managed to make a daring escape

by jumping ship when the vessel neared Bristol. She wasn't a beggar, no, she was a romantic heroine, one who fulfilled every Regency England obsession with the exotic from distant lands. For a summer, Princess Caribou, as she came to call herself, would captivate and be able to be. dominate almondsbury. And then the newspapers and the truth arrived. I'm Dana Schwartz,

and this is Noble Blood. Though Samuel Worrell was the town's minister, he still had a bit of an unsavory reputation. He was a drinker, and there were rumors of behavior as unsavory as gambling. But those rumors were in the past. He would make sure of it. He lived with his American-born wife, Elizabeth, in the large house called Noel Park. Every day, he went into town to try to start his tolls he bank, but it turned out that most of that work would be just trying to prove to the townspeople that he was trustworthy again. When Mr. Hill, the overseer of the poor, arrived on Good Friday,

Samuel and Elizabeth were already awake. Mr. Hill explained what he knew, that this girl with big, brown eyes and strange clothing had just wandered into town, had asked the cobbler for some food and a place to sleep, and then it seemed like she couldn't understand English. The Whirls had a valet from Greece, who had traveled in his youth and could speak half a dozen languages. They called on him to try to understand the girl, but after a few seconds of her speaking, the Greek valet just shrugged his shoulders. It doesn't sound like any language I. ever heard, he said, and I've heard a lot of languages. The stranger had very few belongings with

her, a bundle of soap tied in linen, a few half-pennies, and a single sixpence, which was counterfeit. When they examined the items, the girl just smiled up at them blankly. Well, this is no good, Samuel Worrell said finally, holding the counterfeit sixpence. I'm trying to start a bank. We can't have a girl staying with us. who's involved in counterfeiting. Samuel had decided that the woman was just a random beggar, maybe addled in the brain, but Elizabeth refused to send her back out onto the streets.

Since the woman couldn't stay at their house, Elizabeth went to the local inn, called The Bowl, and got the stranger a room. Elizabeth began setting up the bed, but to her shock, the stranger lay on the floor, ready to go to sleep there. How strange. Elizabeth thought. She benevolently showed the woman that she could instead sleep in a soft bed,

which the woman eventually did, with a bemused acceptance. The next morning, the town clergyman arrived at the bowl, carrying in his arms a stack of books, ready to meet the visitor. The stranger sat with him, eyes bright, smile ready, as he flipped through the travel books, showing illustrations of distant places. When he reached the chapter on China, she became excited, clapping her hands. When he pointed at a picture of a pineapple, she shouted, Ananas!

That settles it, the clergyman said. She must be from Asia. That's the word for pineapples there. The real fact of the matter is, that didn't narrow it down at all. Ananas, or a close variation of that word, is the word for pineapple in almost every language except English around the world, from Azerbaijan to Finland to Turkey.

The poor girl is stranded, Elizabeth Worrell said to her husband, we have to put her up. Absolutely not, Samuel Worrell said. She's a beggar and a counterfeiter, no matter where she's from. She stayed one night in town, but now it's time for the authorities to take care of this. The stranger was brought to Bristol, where the mayor and magistrate there tried her for vagrancy, and imprisoned her in the St. Peter's Hospital for vagrants. But Elizabeth Worrell couldn't stop thinking about the mysterious woman. There had to be someone who could identify her language, someone that she could communicate with.

Samuel still refused to have the strangers stay at their house, and so Elizabeth went into Bristol and brought the woman out of the vagrancy hospital to stay at her husband's office in the city. All the while, she invited anyone back who might be able to solve the riddle of the stranger's language, to come and try to speak with her. Finally, he appeared at the door.

A Portuguese sailor named Manuel Ennis, who had briefly been with the stranger at the vagrancy hospital. He came to the Wurl's office and told Elizabeth that he could translate on behalf of the woman. Her name was Princess Karibu, and she was the daughter of the king of a wealthy, and distant island called Javasu. She had been kidnapped by pirates, but while they were sailing in the Bristol Channel, she managed to jump overboard. Her clothes? Oh, these weren't her original clothes.

She had been wearing a dress of silk, interwoven with gold. But when she came ashore in England, she traded clothes with a woman who lived in a cottage. No, she couldn't say who the women was, or exactly where the cottage was located. Elizabeth Worrell was elated. The visitor wasn't a random vagrant. She was a princess, a beautiful princess, from a glamorous foreign land. Elizabeth took the woman home with her to Noel Park immediately.

What followed was a summer at Noll Park that could only be described as triumphant. Samuel Worrell, who was initially so dismissive of the foreigner who might reduce confidence in his banking endeavor, overnight instead became delighted at the legitimacy that was lended to his bank now that they were hosting a royal visitor. With a slew of admirers and visitors, reporters and hangers-on,

Noel Park became the center of the Bristol social scene that season, full of people eager to meet Princess Karabu and see what strange and exotic thing she did next. Karabu would write in her native Javasu language to people ooing and awing over her shoulder. She cooked a curry and showed off archery skills. She bathes, naked, in the garden and went swimming in the Bristol Channel.

It was a one-woman parade of a foreign culture no one had heard of. She did a war dance with a gong, climbed onto the roof to pray to her god, whom she called Alatala, and took a live pigeon, cut its head off, buried the head, and then poured its blood into the dirt. She refused to eat any meat that she didn't prepare first with that ritual before. Every Tuesday she fasted. Slowly, more details emerged about her life on Javasu. Astonished Brits listened to her tell Sturbanes.

stories about her mother, who had blackened teeth, and a painted body, who wore a jewel in her nose with a chain extending from it. Karibu's father, the king, had three other wives, and traveled only via palanquin. Eventually, the warles had Karabu choose her own clothing from materials and fabrics they provided for her, and she fashioned a dress with a short skirt, but with sleeves long enough to reach the ground. She wore no stockings and twisted her hair atop her head, securing it with a skewer. Princess Karabu fulfilled every fantasy that 19th century Englishmen and women had about the foreign and exotic. Life in the, quote, far east meant strange customs for them to gawk at and celebrate in their delightful and entirely unthreatening eccentricity.

Elizabeth Worrell made sure that Karibu had a proper social reception. She had her portrait painted, and she was the guest of honor at a ball in bath. The only person who didn't seem enchanted by the visiting royal was the Worrell's Greek valet. Convinced that Karibu was a fraud, he shouted, Fire when she was alone in the parlor one afternoon to see if she would react, to prove that she understood English. She didn't react and just continued writing in her strange language on the sheets of paper that the Worrells had provided. But clearly an expert was required, and so in came a man named Dr. Wilkinson, a polymath from Bath who made his living giving subscription lectures on any scientific subject that there ever seemed to be an audience for.

He would be the one to figure out the truth about the story. so-called Karibu. He brought with him to Almond'sbury a massive tone. Edmund Fry's pantographia, and he identified the language that Karabu was speaking as Rajeng, the native tongue of Sumatra. Next, in his examination, he studied Karabu's head. She had a number of strange scars, lining the base of her skull, usually hidden by her hair. But Dr. Wilkinson ran his fingers across them. Just as I suspected, he said, these scars could have only come from Indonesian rituals. Confident in his assessment, Dr. Wilkinson began to make plans to go down to London, to get funding from the foreign office to pay for Princess Karibu's care, and to pay for passage for her to return

to her native land. Dr. Wilkinson published the findings of his report in the Bath Chronicle, writing, quote, Nothing has yet transpired to authorize the slightest suspicion of Karibu, nor has such ever been entertained except by those whose souls feel not the spirit of benevolence and wish to convert into ridicule

that amiable disposition in others. But it turns out those cynical souls were right. As soon as Karabu's story hit the national press, A woman named Mrs. Neal contacted Elizabeth Worrell to tell her the unfortunate truth. The woman calling herself Karibu all summer used to live in a boarding house that Mrs. Neal ran. Princess Karibu was the daughter of a cobbler, born in Devon, and she was named Mary Wilcox. Elizabeth Worrell, shaken by the news, told Karibu that the artist painting her portrait needed one final sitting from her and that they would need to go into Bristol. But when they arrived, they met not with

the artist, but with Mrs. Neal. Confronted face to face, Princess Karabu burst into tears, and, in perfect English, confessed to everything. When Mary Wilcox was still an infant, she came down with rheumatic fever. According to her father, she was never entirely right in the head after that. At 19, she left the village she was raised in and made her way to London, where at some point afterwards, she received a crude, poorly done cupping operation at a poorhouse hospital that gave her the scars that she would bear for the rest of her life. If you're not familiar with what a cupping operation entails, or perhaps if you only associate it with Olympic swimmers, the writer George Orwell described it during the time. a visit to a Paris hospital in his essay, How the Poor Die in 1946. Quote, first the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, and then the student burned the match inside each glass to exhaust the air, and then the glass

was popped onto the man's back or chest, and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical textbooks, but which, till then, I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses. Orwell's essay was written in 1946, over a hundred years after Mary's procedure had been done

in a poorhouse hospital. Back then, cupping also involved slicing the same, skin so that the cups could draw out blood. Mary's, quote, wet cupping operation was meant to relieve the pressure on an overheated brain. The back of her head was shaved, and then blades were used to cut parallel slices in her scalp before hot glasses were applied to suck out blood. Eventually, Mary got a job working as a nursemaid for a family in Clapham called The Mouth. It was a role she seemed born for. She would captivate the children by making up stories for them before bed. Mary's employers lived next door to a Jewish family, and when she was on her breaks, Mary would watch them, fascinated by their clothing and customs.

She found out that the daughter of the family was going to get married, and so she asked her boss, Mrs. Matthews, for the evening off so she could attend the wedding. Mrs. Matthews said no. But Mary, so desperate to see the Jewish rituals she had only ever heard about secondhand, convinced a servant at another nearby house to write a forged letter, pretending to be the lady of the house. The letter said that they were short on domestic staff for a dinner,

someone was sick, would they mind terribly sending Mary along for an evening to help? The letter worked, and Mary left, and then went to the wedding. But then, a few days later, Mrs. Matthews ran into her neighbor. She asked how the evening had gone and how everyone was feeling. Of course, the neighbor was utterly baffled. When Mrs. Matthews confronted Mary, Mary ran and never returned.

Mary's next stop was a Magdalene Hospital for fallen women, or in other words, women who had worked as sex workers. Mary had never been a prostitute, but he was a woman. she liked the costumes that the women at the hospital wore, long-sleeved brown dresses, and flat straw hats. She would watch the group of them walking slowly in the park in the afternoon, and she imagined what it would be like to have a place to belong. When they found out that Mary wasn't, let's say, qualified to actually be at the Magdalene Hospital, she was kicked out. From there she traveled, taking odd jobs, living in a workhouse, traveling to France and back,

eventually getting pregnant but leaving the baby at a foundling hospital, and coming up with several different stories about who the father was. For a little while, she traveled with Romani peasants. Pieces of the Romani language and culture would eventually circle back into her Karaboo routine, but not quite yet. While she was begging in Bristol, Mary noticed that the girls who tended to get the most money from passers-by were the Breton girls who wore traditional Celtic headdresses.

And so, having learned a bit of French, Mary pretended to be French, which worked a little too well because she was brought to the local French consul. Naturally, once she got there, she claimed to be Spanish. What a coincidence, the clerk helping her said. Our cook is Spanish. Here, let me get him. It was then that Mary realized for her act to work she needed a language that no one else could speak. And so Princess Karibu was born.

I don't know if the Portuguese sailor was in on the bit to begin with, whether he was working with Mary, or whether he made up a story and Mary decided to, yes and him all the way to a brand new character. But however it happened, the character of Princess Karibu came together, and for a summer, all of Allman'sbury was fooled. After the news of the fraud came to light, the newspapers that had been fonding over Princess Karibu for weeks, immediately about-faced into abject mockery of Dr. Wilkinson and Mr. and Mrs. Worrell.

You can almost imagine the reaction to this sort of scandal that would happen if Twitter had been around. the memes and photos of Dr. Wilkinson that would circulate. Samuel Worrell's bank collapsed. It was also around this time that Samuel Worrell received word back from Oxford University, where he had sent pages of, quote, caribus writings to be studied. Archbishop Waitley wrote that it was a humbug language. This must be some sort of joke, he said. The text has, quote,

many pot-hooks and unmeaning scrawls, several words and some half-sentences in Portuguese. It is the writing of no known language. Elizabeth Worrell took pity on the humiliated Mary and booked her passage to America. In Philadelphia, Mary took up with a showman who had her peer as Princess Karibu for shows, but none with any success. After seven years in America, Mary was, returned to the UK and tried to exhibit herself once again as Karibu, charging a shilling in London to anyone willing to pay to see her. The Karabu Act died there. Mary changed her last name to a

cousin's to prevent recognition. She married a man named Richard Baker and got a job that she'd work at for the rest of her days until she'd die at age 75. Mary Wilcox Baker, formerly known known as Princess Karibu, the woman who spent her youth begging on the streets and then taking money from people she fooled, had a successful business for the rest of her life, selling an essential medical tool to hospitals. Leeches. That's the story of Princess Karibu, or should I say, quote, Princess Karibu. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear one more legend from her life. In the meantime, just a quick question. reminder that you can support Noble Blood on Patreon at patreon.com slash Noble Blood Tales.

If you want access to behind the scenes information, my bibliographies, and episode scripts. And you can follow me on Twitter at at Danish Schwartz with three Zs. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodem. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo-woo, whoo, who, who.

My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that, Our resilience rests on our relationships.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's one final, let's say, wrinkle in the story of the legendary Princess Karibu. One final mark that Mary Wilcox has. before she retired her act and lived a quiet domestic adulthood. When Mary's ship was sailing from Bristol to America, the ship was run off course by a storm and ended up not too far from St. Helena, the island where Napoleon Bonaparte was being exiled.

According to the journal of a man named Felix Farley, on September 13, 1817, Mary Wilcox came to St. Helena pretending to be Karabu. She introduced herself to Sir Hudson Lowe, the man in charge of Napoleon, on the beach as soon as she came ashore, and said that fate had intertwined her with the former French emperor and that she wanted to meet him. Genially, I suppose, Lowe agreed, and according to our source, Napoleon was charmed. Quote, he intimated his determination. to apply to the Pope for a dispensation to dissolve his marriage with Marie Louise and to sanction his indissoluble union with the enchanting Karibu. There you have it, an act with one final mark, and a pretty good one with that.

Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, Anne Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall, it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.