afraid of committing a mortal sin. When she reached London she was seriously ill—the scars on the back of her head that Dr. Wilkinson had found were in fact the result of a clumsy operation in a poorhouse hospital.
Mary had many other adventures during her five- or six-year absence from the West Country. She was briefly admitted to Magdalen Hospital, a home for fallen women, but was asked to leave when it became clear she hadn’t ever actually worked as a prostitute. When asked why she had come there in the first place, she said simply that she’d liked the look of the brown dresses and straw hats the inmates wore. Once, walking over Salisbury plain, disguised as a man for safety, she was captured and imprisoned by a band of highwaymen. On another occasion, she became pregnant, identifying the father as an Exeter bricklayer called John Baker or a Frenchman she had met in a bookshop. The child didn’t live long and Mary was on her way once more. She fell in step with a group of Romanies, who may have inspired her to invent her “Javasu” language, and worked as a cook for a Jewish family, whose religious rituals possibly provided material for her own arcane incantations.
Just before appearing from nowhere as Princess Caraboo, she was sacked as a children’s nanny by Mr. and Mrs. Starling, of Islington, for frightening the young Starlings with hair-raising tales of being born in the “East Indies.” Mrs. Starling declared her anecdotes so wild she could “not even begin to recollect a quarter of the girl’s vagaries.” Mary had also set fire to two beds in a week.
A contemporary account of Princess Caraboo’s life noted her remarkable ability to maintain her story in the face of repeated questioning and called her performance “an instance of consummate art and duplicity.” On arriving in Bristol from London, Mary noticed the Breton beggar girls, and copied their dress by adopting a turban. She pretended to be French, but when questioned by a French official, she said she was Spanish. When the inevitable Spaniard was produced, she improvised her own lingo out of her own head.
It now seems clear that her great deception began only to avoid being locked up for the night for vagrancy. Finding herself believed by so many of the good folk of Almondsbury, the temptation to avoid, by any means, a return to her degrading and aimless past must have been impossible to resist. What she lacked in formal education she more than made up for in imagination, quick thinking, and an excellent memory. The local gentry were content to go along with her fantasy rather than betray their own ignorance, and when “experts” on foreign countries were called in to question her, the princess invariably kept a judicious but enigmatic silence. But she listened carefully, squirreling away their overheard conversations to use later. As with Psalmanazar, celebrity changed and calmed her. The adulation of her many admirers seemed to assuage the restlessness and suicidal urges of her youth. She did not find riches with her fame, but maybe she found herself and, with that, the contentment that had eluded her for so long.
For the last thirty years of her life Mary lived a genteel existence, quietly supplying leeches to Bristol Infirmary. Her past only occasionally rose up to embarrass her when local children called out “Caraboo!” She fell dead in the street on Christmas Eve 1864, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her daughter, also called Mary, carried on the leech business, living alone in a house full of cats, where she died in a fire in 1900.
Take away the pretensions to royal blood, and Princess Caraboo’s story is echoed a generation later in the adventures of Louis de Rougemont (1847–1921). He came to public notice via a series of fantastic articles published in London’s
His story went like this: Originally Swiss, he had been shipwrecked in 1864 en route to northern Australia on a Singaporean pearling boat. Rescued by his dog Bruno, who dragged him from the depths by his long hair and then towed him ashore by his tail, he spent two years on an uninhabited island, keeping fit by doing gymnastics on the sand and taking rides on the backs of turtles. He steered the turtles by poking his left or right toe into the appropriate eye according to which direction he wanted to travel and then ate them, using their blood to nourish the corn he planted in their upturned shells. Liberated by some passing natives in a canoe, he went back to their village, where he married an Aboriginal tribeswoman called Yamba and was treated as a god. He was given the name Winnimah (meaning “lightning”) because he could shoot down birds in midflight with his bow and arrow. He would lead the tribe into battle against other villages, wearing stilts and dressed as a wizard. At sea he was a fearless sailor, once killing a whale single-handedly and on another occasion wrestling a crocodile.
De Rougemont’s articles did not go unchallenged. Like Psalmanazar, he received a public grilling, in his case by members of the Royal Geographical Society. They were unimpressed by his inability to show them where he had been on any map, and by his sparse grasp of any of the native languages he had supposedly learned in the wild. In due course, an investigation by the
In 1906 he appeared in the huge aquarium at the London Hippodrome, where he successfully demonstrated his turtle-riding skills, but his last business venture (producing an apparently inedible substitute for meat) came to nothing during World War I.
After that, de Rougemont lived, according to his obituary in the
Compared to Cagliostro, his career as an impostor was fleeting. The world had moved on since the days of Psalmanazar and Princess Caraboo. Rationality was the order of the day. Modern communications offered fewer places to hide, and science had learned much with the passing of the years. Though de Rougemont was a plausible liar and armed with in-depth research, he couldn’t resist pushing things too far. His claims of encountering flying wombats were never likely to survive expert scrutiny.
One who did survive expert scrutiny, unsuspected, and for an entire lifetime, was James Barry (1792–1865). Even without the concealment at its heart, Barry’s life would rank as extraordinary. Graduating as a doctor at thirteen, he joined the British Army and was appointed assistant surgeon before his fifteenth birthday. His first posting was to Cape Town, where he became personal physician to the governor, Sir Charles Somerset. In 1826 he found fame as the first British doctor to perform a successful caesarean section. Slightly built and just above five feet tall, James Barry was also famous for his sharp tongue and quick temper, challenging several men to duels (though he never killed anyone). After tours of duty in Mauritius and Jamaica, he was posted to St. Helena as resident surgeon. Here his argumentative streak led to a court-martial for “conduct unbecoming,” and although he was exonerated, he was sent home to England. In 1851 he was appointed deputy inspector general of hospitals in Corfu, where his innovations in the hygiene and diet of patients set new standards that were to inspire Florence Nightingale. Barry was considered too senior to serve in the Crimea, but he nevertheless visited it and met the Lady with the Lamp, giving her the worst dressing down of her life. She was later to write: “I should say [he] was the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the army.” After many more medical reforms and other successes, Barry was retired (against his wishes), settling in Marylebone, London, where he died of diarrhea during an epidemic in 1865.
He had left strict instructions that his body was to be left in the clothes he died in and sewn up in a sheet before his burial. Although the senior doctor had already examined him and signed his death certificate, as his corpse was being laid out, a female attendant noticed something unusual. It was the body of a woman—and one that had, at some point, borne a child. The funeral at St. Paul’s went ahead regardless and Barry was buried (as a man) in Kensal Green cemetery, but the scandalous news soon leaked out. Some said Barry was a hermaphrodite, others that she was a woman; many refused to believe any such thing. But as there was no postmortem, no definitive judgment could be made and the army decided to lock Barry’s records away for a century.
Thanks to some heroic research in the 1950s by the historian Isobel Rae, we now know that James Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley, the daughter of a Cork grocer. She had started dressing as a boy from the age of ten. Her mother, Mary-Ann, was the sister of a real James Barry, a professor of painting at the Royal Academy. The family fell on hard times after Margaret’s father was jailed for debt in 1803, so her mother and some influential friends of her uncle James conspired to smuggle her into medical school.
The disappearance of Margaret Bulkley and the appearance of James Barry were carefully orchestrated. Mrs. Bulkley and “James” traveled up to Edinburgh posing as aunt and nephew, and the new “James Barry” enrolled at
