On the evening of 3 April Mary arrived, tired, hungry and footsore, and knocked on the door of the first house she came to, the home of the village cobbler. Given some bread and milk, Mary mimed with folded hands against her cheek that she wanted to sleep, but the cobbler’s wife was not happy about admitting her to the house, and took her to the overseer of the poor, Mr Hill, whose job it was to bring anyone suspected of vagrancy before the Justice of the Peace. Mary’s foreign persona was the perfect defence. It was impossible to tell if she was a vagrant, and she could hardly be returned to her own parish. When Hill offered her a shilling from parish funds, she refused it, seeming not to understand what it was, and indicated again by a graceful and appealing gesture of her hands that she wanted to sleep.
Still puzzled, Hill took Mary to the home of the Reverend George Hunt, noted for both his learning and his benevolence. He was not at home, but his wife, who was not so noted, took one glance at the be-turbaned Mary, who was making gestures to a sofa, and said she didn’t like the look of her. Hill then remembered that at Knole Park there was a Greek manservant who was much travelled and spoke several languages, and decided to take her there. To Mary, this was the de Clifford incident all over again. At the start, pretending to be French had seemed sufficient, as it had been for her father and sister, but so near to the great trading city of Bristol, she was hardly able to stir a step without encountering people fluent in European languages. As Hill drew her near to Knole, Mary tried to run away again, and only with difficulty could he persuade her to continue.
Knole was then leased by Samuel Worrall, a 63-year-old magistrate, Town Clerk of Bristol and co-director of the Tolzey Bank. He had earned himself the nickname of Devil Worrall, probably because of his bad temper, rude manners and bouts of hard drinking. His wife, Elizabeth, some fourteen years his junior, had been born in Massachusetts, the daughter of a distiller who, as a loyalist during the Revolution, had been obliged to flee to England with his family in the 1770s, after which all his American properties had been confiscated. Known for her interest in literature, she was regarded as something of an intellectual, and was also kind and sympathetic. Now that her two sons had grown to adulthood, her interest would almost certainly have been aroused by a new project.
Mary now came face to face with the Worralls for the first time. They noted her plain clothing and short, slight build. She was undoubtedly attractive, with dark hair, full lips, rosy cheeks and even white teeth. Despite her years of domestic service, her hands were clean, white and soft, another indication that she was no common vagrant. The only unusual aspect of her clothing was the black turban and a red and black shawl arranged loosely and tastefully around her shoulders in what they perceived as the Asiatic fashion. Her other clothing consisted of a black stuff gown with a muslin frill about the neck, black worsted stockings and leather shoes. She carried with her a small bundle, the contents of which they examined. It contained what was later described as ‘a very few necessaries’5 and a small piece of soap wrapped in linen. In her pockets were a few halfpennies and a ‘bad’6 (presumably counterfeit) sixpence.
The Greek manservant was summoned, and asked her questions in a number of languages. Mary decided not to make the same mistake as before when she had claimed to be Spanish. She reacted only with blank incomprehension. He gave his opinion that she must be a foreign gypsy.
It was obvious that Mary could not remain at Knole. She was a homeless girl with a counterfeit coin in her pocket, and it was out of the question for a man in Worrall’s position to harbour someone who might be a criminal. But Mary had from the start worked her fascination on Elizabeth, who decided that she should be given a room at the local inn, the Bowl, some half a mile away, and ordered her maid and footman to accompany her there.
As Mary entered the comfortable parlour of the inn, she saw something that changed the whole direction of her imposture. On the wall was a picture of a pineapple. Botanical prints were then popular decorative items, and usually bore the name of the subject in Latin, which in the case of the pineapple was Ananas. Confident that she would not easily be confronted by someone fluent in the language of the land of the pineapple, Mary moved her origins eastward. She pointed to the picture, became very excited and managed by gestures to convince everyone present that the fruit was from her home country. The effect was electrifying. Doubts and puzzlement gave way to wonder. Having found a homeland, Mary plunged into her role and invented a solemn ritual. Accepting a cup of tea she first bowed her head as if in prayer before drinking it, no doubt inspired by memories of the Jewish practice of uttering blessings before food and drink. After drinking the tea, she insisted on carefully washing the cup before accepting more. So enthralled was her audience that she added more strangeness to her image. Having previously had no problem in identifying a sofa as somewhere to rest, when shown to her room Mary now pretended never to have seen a bed before, and lay down on the floor to sleep. The landlady’s daughter was obliged to lie on the bed to demonstrate what it was for. Mary then knelt to say some prayers, and finally curled up and slept peacefully, leaving the whole village of Almondsbury in a ferment of speculation.
Early the next morning, Elizabeth Worrall hurried over to see Mary, with a bundle of clean linen. Mary was sitting despondently by the fire, probably wondering what to do next, and greeted Elizabeth with great delight. Soon afterwards, Reverend Hunt arrived with an armful of books. Guessing that the turbaned lady came from Asia, he had thought of showing her illustrations of far-away places in the hope of identifying her homeland. As the pages turned he watched her carefully, and then to his surprise saw a flicker of interest in pictures of China. Seeing a picture of a rowing boat, she mimed a much larger vessel, so they would understand she had come to England by ship.
Elizabeth was determined to bring Mary back to Knole, but to her surprise found the girl reluctant to accompany her. She had sensed the distrust of the Greek manservant and felt uncomfortable in his presence. On the walk back to Knole, Mary decided to impress her benefactress with her piety, and on passing the church, went up to the door and tried the handle, looking very disappointed when she was unable to go in. It was Good Friday and at Knole the servants were eating hot cross buns. Mary cut the cross from the top of a bun and held it to her heart. This only increased the mystery surrounding the girl.
Elizabeth, still unsure if the young woman was genuine, summoned Mary to her and expressed her fears that she was being imposed upon: ‘if … 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.’7 She reminded Mary that if it was found that she was deceiving her, Mr Worrall had the power to send her to prison and commit her to hard labour. This was Mary’s opportunity to come clean without penalty, but she did not take it. The chance of playing a part was too good to miss, and she greeted Elizabeth’s address with no sign of understanding, responding in her own made-up language.
Elizabeth was convinced, and determined to find out the stranger’s name. Time and again she pointed to herself, saying her own name. Mary, unsure what to do, did not respond at first. She was offered pen and ink, but hardly liking to risk producing convincing Asian writing, shrank away. Her mind was busy producing a delightfully mysterious and exotic name, a name like no other. Pretending to understand at last, she pointed to herself and spoke: ‘Caraboo’. Elizabeth Worrall was enchanted. John Wells, author of Princess Caraboo: Her True Story, suggests that the name may have been inspired by ‘King Caroo’, an eighteenth-century gypsy king, born only 20 miles from Witheridge. A master of disguise, he too had had adventures in America, and Mary must surely have known of him. Caraboo was now shown around the house, where she demonstrated a great deal of interest in Chinese panelling and an oriental table. At supper, Mary, not exactly sure what a Chinese Christian actually ate, showed disgust for beer, cider and meat, and accepted only vegetables and water
. That night she slept in the servants’ quarters.
The vicar’s theory of Mary being Chinese was about to take a knock, however, for when Elizabeth reported this to the Greek manservant he pointed out that the girl could not be Chinese, since her features were entirely European.
Samuel Worrall may not have known that his wife had brought the mysterious visitor to Knole, and it seems that he was displeased when he returned to find Caraboo in residence. On the day after her arrival Mary was taken to Bristol to appear before the Mayor, John Haythorne, at the Council House in the commercial heart of the city.
She had gone too far now to do anything but continue her imposture. Fortunately the Mayor was not immune to her attractions, and she spoke to him at length and convincingly in her lingo, with beautiful gestures of her white hands. He listened carefully and afterwards a magistrate present declared that ‘her language and manners were such as he had never before heard or seen’.8
Elizabeth Worrall wanted to take her back home, but the Mayor agreed with her husband that the law must be observed. Mary was taken to St Peter’s Hospital, a home for the poor and unemployed. Crowded, noisy, and dirty, with many of the inmates ill or mentally disturbed, this was no place for Caraboo, and Mary, retreating still further into her new persona, stopped eating and refused to sleep in a bed.
It did not take long for news of the attractive stranger to reach Bristol society, and before long, Caraboo was inundated with visitors. Many came just to see the latest curiosity. Some gentlemen, with a taste for eastern exoticism, were drawn to her air of mystery. Others were eager to discover where she was from, and brought with them any foreigners of their acquaintance to see if they could understand her language. A young Scotsman who had travelled in the East later wrote to Elizabeth to theorise that the foreigner was not called Caraboo at all, but came from a place called Karabouh on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and suggested she was shown a map of the area.
Elizabeth Worrall worried about Caraboo all weekend. Visiting Mary on Monday, and finding her tired, hungry and miserable, she at once discharged her and took her to Mr Worrall’s apartment above the Tolzey Bank, leaving her in the charge of the housekeeper. The stream of gentlemen visitors continued, however, as Elizabeth was as anxious as anyone else to find out where Caraboo came from. At least Mary was able to hold court in some comfort. Just how long it would have taken for Samuel Worrall’s patience to wear thin will never be known, for after ten days an unusual visitor arrived who was to change Mary’s life for ever. A Portuguese familiar with Malaya and its languages, he was Manuel Eynesso, although this is not a Portuguese surname and may be a garbled version of the more likely Enes, or Ernesto. He listened to Caraboo’s language, and, like the speaker of Spanish, claimed that he could interpret what she was saying. He told the astonished Worralls that ‘she was a person of consequence in her own country, had been decoyed from an island in the East Indies, and brought to England against her consent, and deserted. That the language she spoke was not a pure dialect, but a mixture of languages used on the coast of Sumatra, and other islands in the East.’9
From that moment Mary was not simply Caraboo but Princess Caraboo. The means by which the Portuguese devised this story will never be known. It could have been something Eynesso fabricated himself either as a joke or out of his unwillingness to admit failure. He could also have taken cues from Mary’s gestures and her ability to memorise and mimic back to him words and phrases he then recognised. It is worth knowing that the Portuguese for ‘princess’ is princesa. Having done his mischief, Eynesso departed abroad and was not heard of again.
So Caraboo was not a vagrant at all, but foreign royalty, cruelly abducted in the most dramatic circumstances and cast, as chance would have it, upon the charity of the Worralls. Mary was at once brought back to Knole. Elizabeth, beside herself with delight at the vindication of her charge, proceeded to make the girl the whole focus of her study. Everyone she knew who might have some story to tell of the East was invited to Knole to meet Caraboo and show her pictures, books and artefacts, from which Mary gained a great deal of useful information to make the imposture more convincing.
One of the books she was shown was Hager’s Elementary Characters of the Chinese, which showed, among other things, how counting was done by means of tying knots in string. Realising that her claims to be Chinese were in doubt, Mary did not respond to anything in the book. She was more interested in the recently published book on Java by Stamford Raffles, and the alacrity with which she pointed to the illustrations made everyone sure that at last they had discovered her origins. The very first picture in the book was of a Javanese man wearing his dagger or kris at his right hip. Fry’s Pantographia, a book illustrating the world’s languages and scripts, also gave some vocabulary of each language, in English. Mary examined the pages carefully, realising that her choice could be crucial. Eventually she pointed to examples of the rare Sumatran dialects, Lampoon and Rejang, and the excited ladies and gentlemen suddenly found they could match words of Caraboo’s spoken language to those in the book. Mary now had ways of saying words like ‘father’ and ‘mother’ and ‘God’, which was ‘Allah Tallah’. She had had to go to the most obscure and little-known corners of the earth in order to make her imposture believable, but she had done it.
A gentleman who had made several voyages to the East Indies was determined to discover the story of Caraboo’s life before arriving in England. He spent a great deal of time with her, and, enchanted by her rosy lips and white teeth, her glossy dark hair, animated expression and theatrical gestures, was able, without understanding a word she said, apart from the few she had learned from Pantographia, to compose the story. Caraboo came from an island she called Javasu. (Mary showed a constant tendency to add an ‘oo’ sound to the end of her made-up words.) Her father was a man of substance, a high-ranking white complexioned Chinese, called Jessu Mandu. Her Malay mother, who had blackened teeth and painted face and arms, had been killed in a war between the Malays and the cannibals or Boogoos. Her father, who had three more wives, travelled in a palanquin carried on the shoulders of ‘macratoos’ (common men) and wore a gold chain around his neck and a peacock-feather headdress. When people approached him they knelt and made a respectful salaam. Caraboo too had worn peacock feathers (Mary must have remembered the plume maker she had stayed with briefly). Her name, originally Sissu Mandu, had been changed to Caraboo to celebrate her father’s great victory. She did not worship idols, indeed she was shocked at the suggestion, recoiling from pictures she was shown. She worshipped God, whom she called Allah Tallah.
Caraboo had been abducted by pirates while walking in her garden. She had been carrying a kris, with which she wounded two of her attackers, one of whom later died. Bound hand and foot, she was taken on board a ship commanded by a man called Chee-min, then sold to a Captain Tappa Boo. Her distress had made her ill, and she had been treated by a surgeon with cupping at the back of her neck. When the ship approached England, she escaped by jumping overboard and swimming ashore. At the time she had been wearing a gown and shawl worked with gold, which she later exchanged for the clothing in which she arrived at Almondsbury.
This account of her travels was swallowed with delight. Asked about the flags of the ports where she stopped during her journey, she mimed that she was below deck and saw nothing, which led the intellectual circle to excuse the fact that the map she drew of her travels made no geographical sense.
Elizabeth was eager to see an example of her visitor’s native costume and provided her with fabric from which Mary, an accomplished seamstress, made a gown with long wide sleeves, embroidered around the waist and hem, and a daring mid-calf in length. She wore no stockings but leather sandals on her bare feet. Unsure of the correct diet to assume, she professed a preference for vegetables and rice, rather than meat or bread, and ate curry, which she prepared herself. Later she accepted fish, and once prepared a pigeon in the Asian style, which she called ‘rampoo’.
Caraboo reco
gnised many artefacts brought to her – a Chinese chain purse, a rose-coloured scarf, pierced ivory fans, a Chinese puzzle, Indian ink, satin stone, garnets, sugar candy and green tea, all of which she indicated came from her father’s country. Cinnamon, cassia, white pepper, rice, mother of pearl, flying fish and a species of apple she identified as coming from Javasu, and coconut, long pepper and coral from her mother’s land. Her listeners eagerly recorded all she said and began to create a vocabulary of her language in which she remained entirely consistent. They were puzzled at first when she used Romany expressions for English coins, such as ‘tanner’ and ‘bob’, but assumed that she had picked these up during her wanderings. One gentleman remarked in her hearing on the difference between the Indian and Malay salaam. Mary duly noted this and later adopted the Malay gesture.
Now that Mary had some examples of writing to follow she was happy to give the fascinated visitors some samples of her own and so produced specimens of graceful curving script. She was also able to read fluently from pages of obscure manuscripts that were placed before her, and since no one had ever translated these before, the readings added to the excitement of her audience. The act almost led to her discovery, however, as a visiting linguist observed in her hearing that the language she was reading was read from right to left. ‘In a few minutes she had changed the mode of her pretending to read, and now traced the words from right to left.’10 Knowing that she was supposed to be worshipping Allah Tallah, she set about doing this in the most theatrical way possible, climbing to the top of the tower early in the morning and disturbing the household with loud chanting.
Fraudsters and Charlatans Page 5