The Beggar Princess of Bristol

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. 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 the 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 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 able with the satisfied lip smack. She thanks 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. Take 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 twenty five 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 Knowl Park, the estate

led by the town clerk, Samuel Whirl. She doesn't speak any English, it seems, Mr Hill said, I can't actually tell what language she speaks. Ms his Whorrel listened from the next room. Nothing unusual tended to happen in Almondsbury. It was a small village where the most exciting going on of that year was Mr Warrell trying to start a local Tolsie bank. But something about this woman aroused

equal parts fascination and suspicion. Mr Hale, Samuel Warrell and Mrs Warrell 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 Java Su 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 dominate Almondsbury. And then the newspapers and the truth arrived. I'm Danish Swartz 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 Noell Park. Every day he went into town to try to start his Tolsie bank, but it turned out that most of the at work would be just trying to prove to the townspeople that he was trustworthy again. When Mr Hale, the overseer of the poor, arrived on

Good Friday, Samuel and Elizabeth were already awake. Mr Hall 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 Worlds 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've 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 halfpennies, and his single sixpence, which was counterfeit. When they examined the items, the girl just smiled up at them blankly. Well this is no good, Samuel Warrell 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, Absolutely not, Samuel Warrell 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 Warrell 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 stranger 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 World's Office and told Elizabeth that he could translate on behalf of the woman. Her name was Princess Carribou, and she was the daughter of the king

of a wealthy and distant island called Java Su. 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 woman was or exactly where the cottage was located. Elizabeth

Whorl was elated. The visitor wasn't a random vagrant. She was a princess, a beautiful princess from a amorous foreign land. Elizabeth took the woman home with her to Nol Park immediately. What followed was a summer at Nol Park that could only be described as triumphant. Samuel Laurel, 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, Nol Park became the center of the Bristol social scene that season, full of people eager to meet Princess Carribou and see what strange and exotic thing she did next. Carribou would write in her native Javastu language to people ooing and aweing over her shoulder.

She cooked a curry and showed off archery skills. She bathed 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 Allah Talah, 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 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. Carribou's father, the King,

had three other lips and traveled only via palanquin. Eventually, the worlds had Carriboo 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 car Aboo fulfilled every fantasy that nineteenth 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 Warrel made sure that Carribou 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 visit a ng royal was the world's Greek valet, Convinced that Carbou 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 worlds 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 this show called car Aboo. He brought with him to Almondsbury a massive tone Edmund Fries pantographia, and he identified the language that Carbou was speaking as rage,

the native tongue of Sumatra. Next in his examination, he studied Carbrew'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 Carbrew'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 Carribou, nor has such ever been entertained, except by those whose souls feel not the spirits of benevolence, and wished to convert into ridicule that amiable disposition in others. But it turns out those cynical souls were right. As soon as Carribou story hit the national press, a woman named Mrs Neil

contacted Elizabeth Worrell to tell her the unfortunate truth. The woman calling herself Carriboo all summer used to live in a boarding house that Mrs Neil ran. Princess Carribou was the daughter of a cobbler born in Devon, and she was named Mary Wilcox. Elizabeth Warrell, shaken by the news, told Carriboo 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 Neil. Confronted face to face, Princess Carribou 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 nineteen, 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 a visit to a Paris hospital in his essay How the Poor Die in nineteen forty six. Quote. First the doctor produced from his black back 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 over a hundred years after Mary's procedure had been

done in a poorhouse hospital. Back then, cupping also involved slicing the skin so that the cups could draw out blood. Mary's quote wet cupping operation was meant to relieve the pressure on an overheated rain. 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 and Clapham called the Matthews.

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 brakes, 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 second hand, in vinced 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 up 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 she liked the costumes that the women at the hospital wore, long sleeved

brown dresses and flat straw hats. She would want 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 Magdalen 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 carbow 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 Carribou 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 Carribou came together and for a summer all of Almondsbury was fooled. After the news of the fraud came to lay, the newspapers that had been fonding over Princess Carribou for weeks immediately about faced into abject mockery of Dr Wilkinson and Mr and Mrs Warrell. 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 Warrell's bank collapsed. It was also around this time that Samuel Warrel received word back from Oxford University, where he had sent pages of Quote car Abows writings to be studied. Archbishop Weighty 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 Quarrel 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 Carribou for shows, but none with any success. After seven years in America, Mary returned to the UK and tried to exhibit herself once again as Carribou, charging a shilling in London to anyone willing to pay to see her. The Carribou 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 died at age seventy. Mary Wilcox Baker, formerly known as Princess Carribou, 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 Carribou, or should I say quote Princess Carribou, But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear one more legend

from her life. In the meantime, just a quick reminder that you can support Noble Blood on Patreon at patreon dot 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 wartz with three z s. There's one final, let's say, wrinkle in the story of the legendary Princess Carribou, one final mark that Mary Wilcox hit 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 Saint Helena, the island where Napoleon Bonaparte was being exiled. According to the journal of a man named Felix Farley, on September thirteenth, eighteen seventeen, Mary Wilcox came

to Saint Helena, pretending to be a carboo. She introduced herself to Sir Hudson Low, 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 Low agreed, and according to our source, Napoleon

was charmed. Quote he intimated his determination to apply to the Pope for a dis in station, to dissolve his marriage with Marie Louise, and to sanction his indissoluble union with the enchanting Caribou. There you have it, and act with one final mark, and a pretty good one with that. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey,

Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.