The Bristol Princess

Summary

Hoax! — "The Bristol Princess"

Podcast: Hoax!
Hosts: Dana Schwartz & Lizzie Logan
Episode Date: April 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Hoax!, Dana Schwartz and Lizzie Logan dive deep into the astonishing 19th-century tale of Princess Caribou—a beguiling woman who fooled an entire English town into believing she was foreign royalty. Using her expertise from a prior episode on Noble Blood, Dana unpacks not only the wild events of the hoax itself but also the broader context, motivations, and cultural climate that allowed such a deception to thrive. Along the way, the hosts reflect on historical gullibility, the dynamics of “otherness,” and why stories like these continue to captivate audiences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Princess Caribou — The Setup

• Setting the Scene ([04:38])

  • It's 1817 in Almondsbury, outside of Bristol, England. A mysterious, exotically dressed young woman arrives speaking an unknown language.
  • Dana: “She’s wearing what are described as exotic clothes… kind of looks like… a child dressing like a flamenco dancer.” ([05:11])
  • The mysterious woman carries only soap, a few ha’pennies, and a counterfeit sixpence.

• Early Encounters

  • She first visits a cobbler’s house, pantomimes hunger and asks for food.
  • Promptly passed through social welfare authorities, ending up at the home of local magistrate Samuel Worrell and his American wife, Elizabeth.

• Physical Description and Social Reaction ([06:52])

  • Lizzie raises questions about the mystery woman's appearance and perceived ethnicity.
  • Dana: “She is in fact like a white person… but… sort of just like swarthy. She maybe doesn't seem English.”

2. Why Did People Believe Her? Pretty Privilege & Exoticism

• The Power of Attractiveness

  • Dana: “I do feel like pretty privilege really does exist… this is not just like an old crone, this is a pretty young woman, and I think that makes a difference in the story.” ([07:43])
  • Modern analogies are drawn to the "hot felon" phenomenon and how attractiveness affects credibility and sympathy ([08:19]).

• Society’s Fascination with the Exotic

  • England at this time is enamored with foreignness and the “other.”
  • Dana: “What’s happening in England is the exotic is very exciting.” ([12:01])

3. The Caribou Persona and Her Summer of Fame

• The “Translation” and Creation Myth ([10:11])

  • With the help of a Portuguese sailor (possibly in cahoots with her), the woman claims to be “Princess Caribou” from the imaginary island of Javasu.
  • Her invented language is identified as a mix of gibberish and Romani words.

• Enthralling the Locals ([12:44])

  • Mysterious behaviors—sleeping on the floor, recognizing “nanas” (pineapple) in foreign prints, demonstrating archery skills, cooking curry, performing “war dances,” and praying to “Allah tala.”
  • She’s the center of attention, depicted as a “born sexy yesterday” archetype—“body of a hot woman, brain of a child, not for creepy reasons but for like sci-fi reasons.” ([13:19])

4. Scrutiny & Unmasking the Hoax

• Testing the Ruse ([21:00])

  • A skeptical servant shouts “fire” at night to see if Caribou breaks character; she does not.

• Exposure ([22:20])

  • Mrs. Neal, a boarding house owner, recognizes Caribou as Mary Wilcox, a former servant known for wearing turbans and making up languages.
  • Lizzie: “I’m obsessed with her… She’s really the patron saint of committing to the bit.” ([22:33])

• Public Reaction & Social Commentary

  • Instead of punishing Mary, the public laughs at the duped Bristol elites.
  • Dana: “Everyone is laughing at the people around her and, like, kind of give her a pass, I think. Mr. Worrell’s bank collapses… probably because everyone’s like, oh, yeah, this guy’s terrible judgment.” ([30:06])

5. Who Was Mary Wilcox? (Princess Caribou's Real Identity)

• Early Life and Quirks ([23:57])

  • Born to a cobbler, suffered possible mental effects from illness, fond of other cultures and languages, imaginative storyteller—sometimes to a problematic, exploitative extent.

• Evolving the Hoax

  • After seeing that “Breton” girls got more charity while begging, Mary began creating ever more obscure personas to avoid being exposed.

• Motivations and Context

  • Dana: “If she’s going to fake an ethnicity, she needs one that no one can call her on.” ([28:44])

6. After the Hoax: The Aftermath and Her Later Life

• Post-Unmasking ([29:15])

  • Mary wasn’t punished due to the mostly harmless, comedic nature of her crime; instead, Bristol society suffered the ridicule.

• American Adventure and Celebrity ([31:08], [34:20])

  • Travels to America, performs on stage as Princess Caribou to declining interest, writes letters about the distress of notoriety.
  • Dana: "Nowadays if someone is like, quote-unquote, canceled, they... capitalize on that notoriety for money…” ([34:20])

• Return to obscurity

  • Returns to England, marries, sells leeches to hospitals, haunted by her fleeting past fame ([36:05]).
  • Lizzie: “She’s just the leech lady… trying to have a respectable job.” ([36:15])

7. Cultural Reflections—Why Did This Hoax Work?

• Societal Willingness to Believe

  • Scholarly context: Dana cites Matthew Isaac Cohen’s article about how Princess Caribou offered “a ground for imperial fantasy”—a safe, controlled embodiment of British exotic fascinations ([39:06]).

• Modern Parallels

  • The hosts compare Princess Caribou’s story to contemporary figures who embellish their backgrounds for attention (e.g., Hilaria Baldwin, Rachel Dolezal, “born in the wrong neighborhood” artists), as well as actors who overplay suffering origins ([41:18]).

• Ongoing Cultural Fascination

  • The myth endures in adaptations—1994’s Princess Caribou starring Phoebe Cates, musicals, and dramatizations, though many skip the underlying issues of race and exoticism ([42:32]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dana on “pretty privilege”:
  “If you see an unhoused person or a felon who is very conventionally attractive, something in you is like, well, that person shouldn’t be there. They should be doing Pilates.” ([08:24])

• Lizzie on Princess Caribou “committing to the bit”:
  “I’m obsessed with her. I love her so much. This is incredible. I love how much she has committed to the bit.” ([22:26])

• Dana on the historical context:
  “[Her] performance offered… a theatricalized front to a British audience that was keen to believe in the possibility of the other coexisting in their midst.” ([39:06])

• On how to really succeed as a hoaxer:
  “You have to phase out the accent… If you start with an accent, you have to phase it out.” ([44:40])

• On Princess Caribou’s fleeting fame:
  Lizzie: "One special summer."
  Dana: "One amazing, wild summer." ([45:16])

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Important Timestamps

• [04:38]: The setting in 1817 Almondsbury, England and Princess Caribou's arrival
• [06:52]: First descriptions of Caribou’s appearance (and “swarthy” not-English looks)
• [10:11]: “Translation” by a Portuguese sailor; the Caribou invention explained
• [12:44]: The beginnings of her spectacle in society, nuances of “pretty privilege”
• [17:18]: Accounts of her behaviors—archery, curry, praying, war dance—and public fascination
• [22:20]: Mrs. Neal exposes Caribou as Mary Wilcox, the committed performer
• [29:15]: The aftermath of her exposure—nobody punished but the reputation of the local elite
• [34:20]: American chapter: capitalizing on notoriety, parallels to “cancel culture comeback tours”
• [39:06]: Scholarly context about "imperial fantasy" and Britain’s desire for a safe, entertaining other

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Podcast Tone & Style

• Dana and Lizzie maintain a witty, conversational, and incisively skeptical tone throughout the episode, reveling in the absurdity of the story while exploring broader cultural and historical questions.
• They balance empathy for Mary Wilcox as an impoverished, possibly mentally ill woman, with critical awareness of her exploitation of racial stereotypes.
• The hosts frequently connect 19th-century phenomena to modern celebrity culture and internet phenomena, keeping the conversation relevant and lively.

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Summary Takeaway

The story of Princess Caribou is an embodiment of society’s perennial hunger for novelty, sensation, and the exotic, all filtered through the lens of privilege, gullibility, and the desire to believe in a myth. Dana and Lizzie deftly unravel not just the facts of the hoax itself, but why such stories thrive—then and now—and what they reveal about us today.

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For more from the hosts:

• Contact: @hooksthepodcast on Instagram / [e-mail]
• Dana Schwartz on Instagram and TikTok
• Support: Preorder Dana’s book "The Arcane Arts"

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Please hoax responsibly!

Transcript

[Lizzie Logan]

This is an I Heart Podcast Guaranteed

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[Lizzie Logan]

When I first heard the words you have lung cancer, I was in shock.

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It's a diagnosis that changes everything. So what does it really mean to advocate for yourself when you when you're living with non small cell lung cancer? Listen to Health discovered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Dana Schwartz]

You are listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart podcasts, folks. It's a hoax outcome.

[Lizzie Logan]

No one ever seems to believe me

[Dana Schwartz]

when I swear I never was deceiving the last one. Welcome to Hoax, a podcast about the lies we wish were true and truths

[Lizzie Logan]

that sound like lies.

[Dana Schwartz]

I'm the ghost of Dana Schwartz and

[Lizzie Logan]

I'm the evil twin of Lizzie Logan.

[Dana Schwartz]

Welcome to the show. So, Lizzy, this is a rare time in this podcast where I am going to be talking about a hoax that I have covered on Noble Blood. My other podcast, self plagiarism. It's self plagiarism. I did go back to the same well of research, but the reason that I wanted to talk about it is because I feel like sometimes the format of Noble Blood 1 this is just a quintessential hoax and it is delightful. But also, I think the form of Noble Blood as like a scripted show with a one single narrative sometimes means I can't explore things in as wide reaching a way as I want to.

[Lizzie Logan]

It lacks a little Lizzie.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, that's actually what I was gonna say.

[Lizzie Logan]

I'm not on Noble Blood. Really.

[Dana Schwartz]

I was gonna say it doesn't have Lizzie's take. And you know, I would never. I don't really often pause Nobleblood episodes to be like, I always take the historical consensus, but I never pause and like, oh, this source says this and this source says that. And I mean, very rarely do I do that. So I am excited to talk a little bit about the broader historical context around a hoax called Princess Caribou.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay, great. I think I've listened to this Nobleblood episode, but I think it was a long time ago.

[Dana Schwartz]

It was a long time ago.

[Lizzie Logan]

I have a vision of myself listening to it at the gym and it's been so long since I went to the gym that I'm like, it couldn't have been this year and it couldn't have been last year.

[Dana Schwartz]

It was in fact a very long time ago. Okay, so we're gonna start the story on April 3, Good Friday. Some people say it took place the Thursday before, but most of the story takes place Good Friday, 1817. Okay, so Frankenstein's about to be written. I think Bridgerton is probably happening around this time. Anatomy A love story. If you're thinking about costumes and what's happening in England at this time.

[Lizzie Logan]

And we're in England.

[Dana Schwartz]

We are in England. We're in Bristol, which is the far west of England, like almost Wales.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

And a woman arrives to the small town of Almondsbury, which is right outside Bristol. And she's wearing what are described as exotic clothes, which in this case just means like a black turban, a head covering, a black gown with like a muslin frill at the neck and a red and black shawl. To me, looking pretty cool outfit. Pictures of it. It kind of looks like a, like a stereo. Like a child dressing like a flamenco dancer.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, funny.

[Dana Schwartz]

Like not an accurate reflection of that, but it's like a girl like putting a scarf on and being like, I'm Spanish.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes, okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

Like a child.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's very dramatic.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yes. And she has a bundle, and this is important. Carrying soap, just a few ha' pennies and a counterfeit sixpence. And that's all she has. And this young woman goes to the house of a cobbler first and talks to him and his wife, but she's not speaking English, just sort of an unintelligible language. And she mimes that she's hungry. They give her some food. And then she mimes like, oh, can I sleep here? And they're like, no. Yeah, no, no, no. And the cobbler's wife takes this woman to the overseer of the poor, who's a person who's in charge of what? It sounds like he's like the one who levies taxes on people and then manages those taxes to manage poor houses and distribute food, money and clothing. Feels like the overseer of the poor is exactly who should be overseeing this situation.

[Lizzie Logan]

That's who you call.

[Dana Schwartz]

And the overseer, though, also pawns her off on someone else. He goes to like the local magistrate, sort of the mayor equivalent of this town, Samuel Worrell and his American born wife Elizabeth, to like figure out this whole thing.

[Lizzie Logan]

Two questions. How old does this woman appear to be? And like what color is she?

[Dana Schwartz]

Young, pretty?

[Lizzie Logan]

Uh huh. You're asking like race, ethnicity, like just appearance wise. Because if she can't talk, then she can't really explain her ethnicity, but just like purely on the surface.

[Dana Schwartz]

So again, I mean, she could talk, but not in the 19th century. Our understanding of race is different than it is now. She has dark hair and dark eyes.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

She is in fact like a white person.

[Lizzie Logan]

Right.

[Dana Schwartz]

But that she's also sort of just like swarthy.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay. So she doesn't seem English maybe.

[Dana Schwartz]

She maybe doesn't seem English. And again, she's not dressed like an English woman. She's speaking another language and she's a poor beggar woman. But this is also a case where I do feel like pretty privilege really does exist.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

Where this isn't just like an old crone. This is like a very pretty young woman. And I think that makes a difference in the story. And so as you're listening to the story and how people are treating her, I think the fact that she is pretty makes a difference.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, totally.

[Dana Schwartz]

Which is just an unfortunate reality of the world then as it is now. I feel like fundamentally there was a big to do. I think the equivalent to this story is there was a big to do because there was a very handsome convict at one point. Do you remember this?

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, like, yeah, the. The hot felon.

[Dana Schwartz]

The hot felon.

[Lizzie Logan]

And there's a whole account that's like, mug. Shouties. Yeah, like mugshot of, like, shouties.

[Dana Schwartz]

I think fundamentally, if you see an unhoused person or a convict, a felon who is very conventionally attractive, something in you is like, well, that person shouldn't be there. They should be doing Pilates.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

I mean, Jim Gaffigan has a whole bit about how actors are way too good looking to be believable as, like, in certain roles where he talks about, like, Halle Berry in Monsters Ball, he's like, she played that poverty stricken woman the whole time. I was like, why doesn't she just become a model? She could be the next Halle Berry.

[Dana Schwartz]

So basically, they bring her to this magistrate to figure out what her deal is. And she acts pretty unusually. She sleeps only on the floor of the room, even though there's a bed. And then when they bring her to, like, a local inn called the bowl, their botanical prints are very popular around this time. Like on the wall, and she sees a botanical print of a pineapple and says nanas, which is. Nanas is a word for pineapple in Indonesian, but also a lot of other different languages. And. And people are like, oh, she knows what the exotic fruit pineapple is. And then they show her pictures of China, and she gets, like, very animated and excited, even though they don't know what language she's speaking. So they're like, okay, maybe this woman came from Asia again, Samuel Worrell is the magistrate of this town, but he doesn't want to be associated with a counterfeiter because they had found a counterfeit coin in her purse. And he's like, I don't wanna get in trouble for this. I'm gonna have this woman be tried for vagrancy in Bristol because he thinks she's just a vagrant.

[Lizzie Logan]

I don't wanna get in trouble for being around this person who did this crime.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

For such, like, my job.

[Dana Schwartz]

Well, you should turn her into the authorities. All right. I will also say different sources sometimes characterize Samuel Worrell very ungenerously. Like, people are like, he's a drunk and a cruel man. And I take those with a grain of salt because a lot of contemporary sources just don't comment on his personality. And I think if you are embellishing this story, you want to, like, add a little spice to the side characters. And you're like, oh, well, he sent her to be tried for vagrancy. What a cruel man. Presumably a drunkard. So you might see anyone researching this story might see things like that. I just am like, I don't know. He didn't want to get involved with this strange woman acting in a weird way. But she is briefly imprisoned, and it's while she's in Bristol that she meets a Portuguese sailor. And sometimes in some sources, he's named Manuel Ennis, but I've also seen Manuel Eneso, and he says that he actually understands the language that she's speaking, and he's able to translate and says that according to this woman, her name is Princess Caribou. She's from the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean, right off of Sumatra. She was kidnapped from her homeland by pirates, managed to escape by jumping overboard, and that's how she ended up in Bristol. And from this translation of the Portuguese Sailor, we learn that she's the daughter of a Chinese person of rank and a Malay woman, which is a indigenous tribe to this group, like an indigenous ethnic group in what we now call the Indonesian islands. Javasu, again, located off the coast of Sumatra. But I'm gonna do a brief spoiler for people who maybe are like, I don't know where Javasu is. That's not a real place. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

It doesn't sound real.

[Dana Schwartz]

Well, it sounds kind of like Java.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes.

[Dana Schwartz]

And Sumatra. But you're like, okay, sort of put them together, but it's not real. But what's happening right now in England is the exotic is very exciting. Yeah. And so this woman is let out of prison, and the Worrells, drunk and cruel or not, take her back to their house. And this is where, like, two months of the best summer we ever had started. So she is staying with the Worrells in this small town, and it is

[Lizzie Logan]

just like, do they keep this Portuguese guy around to continue translating?

[Dana Schwartz]

No.

[Lizzie Logan]

At this point, because it seems like he's really key to this whole thing.

[Dana Schwartz]

By this point, she's able to communicate enough.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

And I think part of, like, her childlike inability to articulate things is part of her, I'm going to say air quotes charm. Okay. I also, again, want to be like, she's very pretty. She has this sort of childlike approach to things, and I think that's why people get very excited about her.

[Lizzie Logan]

There's a great YouTube video that, as far as I know, this YouTube video is what coined the term, but it's a term that people use now to describe this character trope in movies, mostly sci fi. Born sexy Yesterday.

[Dana Schwartz]

Born sexy. That's exactly what she is.

[Lizzie Logan]

Where it's like Leeloo in the Fifth

[Dana Schwartz]

Element or a little bit Madison in Splash. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Or Bella in Poor Things, where it's usually a woman who has the body of a hot woman and the brain of a child, not for creepy reasons, but for, like, sci fi reasons.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And so she's very helpless, and she's also very sexy for some reason.

[Dana Schwartz]

My brain also goes to, like, mermaid things. So I'm going to like, you know the woman in Splash or, like, in Aquamarine. Yes, that girl where it's just like, I'm just so helpless and silly and naive with my strange customs. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Like, how do this work?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, it's othering a foreigner, but it's not racist.

[Lizzie Logan]

If she's a mermaid, it's infantilizing a grown woman so that you can still want to fuck her. And also, she has no agency.

[Dana Schwartz]

That is exactly what's happening with this woman. So a ton of visitors are coming through Allmansbury because they're all so excited to see her. The Worrells are very excited that they have a royal visitor. And Samuel Worrell is actually starting a private bank at this time. And he feels like the publicity and sort of the esteem of having a royal guest is, like, bolstering his local business.

[Lizzie Logan]

Surely the answer to this question will be no, but does anyone have the idea of, like, oh, we should probably get her home?

[Dana Schwartz]

No.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

She's in England now. How wonderful.

[Lizzie Logan]

She's a princess where she's from. Why does she want to live with these fucking people?

[Dana Schwartz]

Maybe because she's having a freaking blast.

[Lizzie Logan]

She's a princess.

[Dana Schwartz]

I know.

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[Dana Schwartz]

So there's all these anecdotes because a few I'm not to jump ahead but newspapers get word of her and we'll write all these anecdotes. So a lot of our sources for These unusual things. She does come from newspapers, but according to one source, this gentleman who had visited Malay in recent years brought out a souvenir sword and caribou. The princess gets very excited and recognizes it as belonging to her country. And they even say she tries to grab at it. But quote from Prudence, it was denied her, which is very boring, sexy yesterday. It's like, well, she can't have a knife. And then she. But she placed the dagger to her right side, where, according to this gentleman who had visited Malay, the Malay people wore it, which, quote, confirmed to this gentleman that she perfectly understood the custom, though not the language of that country, because she is not speaking Malay.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

She is, in fact, not speaking any language that anyone really recognizes. There's sort of a local expert, like A polymath named Dr. Wilkinson, who shows her this book, Edmund Fry's Pantographia, which has. Is like a manual of different languages. And she picks hers, and which he identifies as one called Re Jeng, which is, I believe, spoken in Sumatra. And this doctor also identifies that she has strange markings on her head, scars that could only have come, he says, from Eastern medicine, practices some sort of barbaric surgery.

[Lizzie Logan]

Wow. So she. She's from, like, all over.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, she has some strange scars on her head. And we're like, we don't know what that is. They send samples of her language to Oxford to be like, do you know what this is? And they're like, no. So no one quite. I mean, this Dr. Wilkinson identified what he thought the language was, but no one quite knows what she's saying, even though some of the words she's using are specific to Indonesian languages.

[Lizzie Logan]

Did you, in middle school read the island of the Blue Dolphins?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yes. I love that book.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's like the real version of this.

[Dana Schwartz]

Real version of island of the Blue Dolphins.

[Lizzie Logan]

Well, no, the island of the Blue Dolphins is based on a real lady.

[Dana Schwartz]

What? A woman's whole family left her behind on an island.

[Lizzie Logan]

I think they all, like, died or something. And then she was like, the. If I'm remembering fourth grade correctly, she, like, got separated from her family or whatever and became, like, the last person in the world who spoke her language.

[Dana Schwartz]

Okay. I did not realize island of the Blue Dolphin was inspired by a real story.

[Lizzie Logan]

Can we very quickly check if I'm right?

[Dana Schwartz]

Yes, yes. The lone woman of San Nicolas island left alone for 18 years. Wow.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. This woman crazy. Again, no one. It's hard to get to the place that she came from. No one really understands the language, but they're having just a fun summer with her.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay, great.

[Dana Schwartz]

She's doing. She swims naked.

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[Dana Schwartz]

Hot. She practices archery and is apparently very good at it.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay, badass. Badass.

[Dana Schwartz]

Cooks a chicken curry, performs a war dance with a gong, and prays on the roof to a God that she calls Allah tala, which is also a name for a God in a bunch of a few other languages.

[Lizzie Logan]

Allah is most Muslim, but Allah Tala specifically.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. She also declines to drink alcohol. She brings one or both of her hands to her forehead to greet people. She bathed more often than was the custom and wore a shawl while praying. They also just put her in exotic clothing and have her portrait painted and throw a ball for her in her honor. In Beth.

[Lizzie Logan]

She's kind of like E.T.

[Dana Schwartz]

yeah, but they're all having a great time being like, what is she gonna do next? So this doctor, Dr. Wilkinson, who examined her head and examined her language, published her findings. There's a Telegraph article written about her. This is, you know, June at this point, one of the Worrell servants, allegedly, who's a Greek man, doesn't think she's legit and he decides to test her. And in the middle of the night, he walks around and shouts fire to see if she would react because that would prove that she knew English. But she didn't. This story, over the course of about eight weeks, gains in popularity. I think I understand why, which is kind of. I don't want to get ahead of myself. But the reason people are so interested in this story I think is kind of the main fascination here. But this story becomes so well known that this woman named Mrs. Neal, who runs a boarding house in Bristol, hears about it and sees a photograph. Not a photograph, sees a drawing of this young woman in the newspaper and she recognizes the picture of her published in the Bristol Journal and goes to inform the worlds that, oh, this girl that you're calling Princess Caribou. I know her. She's a former servant and her name is Mary Wilcox. And when she lived in the boarding house that I ran, she just like, would sometimes wear a turban and do a made up language for fun.

[Lizzie Logan]

I'm obsessed with her. I love her so much. This is incredible. I love how much she has committed to the bit.

[Dana Schwartz]

She. It's. She's really the patron saint of committing to the bit.

[Lizzie Logan]

I mean, this is like Nathan Fielder wishes, like, this is jury duty, but uno reversed.

[Dana Schwartz]

This is just her turning everyone else into the jury duty guy.

[Lizzie Logan]

She's just pranking. I mean, the greatest character actress of Our time.

[Dana Schwartz]

I do. I want to point out. And we'll get to this a little later. She is exploiting and othering people of different races. Yeah. To be like a slight buzzkill here. She's not just doing like a quirky character, but she is the queen of committing to the bed.

[Lizzie Logan]

I'm gonna not give her a pass for being of her time, but I'm gonna contextualize her as being of all of the things that people are doing in the pre Civil War world. I realize this is in England.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

This to me, does not rank among the atrocities.

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh, not the. Not the atrocities to people of color. And I also want to point out, I don't think the problem is as much with her as it is everyone around her.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. If they didn't want to believe in racist stereotypes, there would have been no stereotypes for her to exploit.

[Dana Schwartz]

That is it. It's everyone around her delighted that she is indulging exactly the racist stereotype that they want to enjoy.

[Lizzie Logan]

What a grifter.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah. So who is Mary Wilcox? She was born in 1791 or 92 in Devonshire. Her father was a cobbler. We don't know anything about her mother.

[Lizzie Logan]

Is that why she went to a cobbler house?

[Dana Schwartz]

Oh.

[Lizzie Logan]

Because she was like, I know how to get around a cobbler house.

[Dana Schwartz]

Maybe I never even put that together. Maybe. See, this is what you need.

[Lizzie Logan]

These things are not coming up on Noble Blood.

[Dana Schwartz]

Her dad apparently said that when she was young, she suffered from rheumatic fever, which affected her mentally after that. So we don't. We don't even know what's going on up there.

[Lizzie Logan]

She's a little kooky.

[Dana Schwartz]

She's a little kooky. She left home at 19, came to London, and she got very sick and went to a poor house hospital and received an improperly done cupping operation on her head. And that was what gave her the scars, which I find very funny. It's like people being like, oh, only a primitive eastern country could have possibly done this to her. And it's like, no, this happened in London because she was a poor person at the hospital. It's people not realizing the barbaric practices are what they're doing in their own communities.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

She worked as a nursemaid for a family in Clapham, and apparently the children really liked her. She was very imaginative with stories.

[Lizzie Logan]

Sounds like it.

[Dana Schwartz]

Then she got very interested in their Jewish neighbors. She just, like, loved their language and their prayers. I mean, we love an ally. We love someone being interested in the community.

[Lizzie Logan]

What is not an anti Semite. Like a pro Semite.

[Dana Schwartz]

Pro Semite. She gets fired from her job for attending a Jewish wedding. I know.

[Lizzie Logan]

That is insane.

[Dana Schwartz]

I know. It's. I like, I love an ally, but I also. There's, like, the bit of balance here where she was, like, maybe a little too interested in their prayer and language, where I do feel a little like, have you read that Judge Judy Interview with RuPaul?

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, yes. Yes.

[Dana Schwartz]

Where it's like, incorporating Judaism into your personality is maybe something you don't need. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

But, like, attending a wedding to me

[Dana Schwartz]

is like, the wedding is great.

[Lizzie Logan]

Like, that's fun. Like, go celebrate.

[Dana Schwartz]

Go celebrate. She shouldn't have gotten fired. No justice for Mary Wilcox. Yeah, but she did. This is also one of the most iconic details about her that I love. She gets admitted to a Magdalene hospital for fallen women, which is, like, where us sex workers would go, because, quote, she admired the uniform of brown dresses and straw hats for the inmates. So she sees that these women, these fallen women in a Magdalene hospital are wearing brown dresses and straw hats, and she's like, I like that. And so she gets in.

[Lizzie Logan]

That's like the opposite of Maria von Trapp being like, I love what's going on with the nuns. I'll become a nun. She's like, I love what's going on with the sex workers. I'll hang out with the sex worker.

[Dana Schwartz]

She gets kicked out when it's discovered that she's not actually a sex worker. And then we get pieces of her backstory from here, where we're just kind of assuming and putting pieces together. We know she hops around, possibly goes to France, where she learns some French. She becomes pregnant, gives birth in secret. At first she says the father was a bricklayer from Essex. Later she'll say it was a Frenchman she met in a bookshop. The child passes away very tragically. And this is when Mary hits the road with a group of Romani people. And this is kind of important because there's a lot of their language and culture that she'll sort of imitate in her own little way. She'll take the seeds and then have fun with it. Yeah. She becomes a beggar in Bristol because she got fired for going to a Jewish wedding. What she's supposed to do. And this is kind of where the seeds of the caribou trick are born, because she notices in Bristol there are girls who are from Brittany who are like ethnic Bretons, and that's like a Celtic ethnic group. And she notices that the Breton girls make more money because they're begging in their traditional Breton clothing. And she's like, hmm, okay. Whether it's, like, because you're getting attention or you look more unique or something about it. Mary puts on a turban and pretends to be French as a beggar. But then they take her to the French consul, and she doesn't actually speak all that well, and so she pretends to be Spanish. And then at the French consul, they're like, oh, we have a cook who's Spanish. Hold on one second. And then she's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. Just kidding. And I think this is probably the point where she realizes that if she's going to fake an ethnicity, she needs one that no one can call her on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then that's, I think, how the Princess Caribou situation began. We can kind of assume that the Portuguese guy was in on.

[Lizzie Logan]

Sounds like she. Maybe not from the beginning, but maybe

[Dana Schwartz]

she, like, met him and was like,

[Lizzie Logan]

wasn't what to tell people.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, okay. I mean, we don't have any information on that. We don't know what their relationship was, but it kind of reading between the lines, I'm like, I assume she was just like, go along with this. Let's have fun. And again, pretty young girl. So I think more people were willing to go along with it.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. So is that how it ended, was when this woman, like, outed her after seeing her in the paper?

[Dana Schwartz]

Well, so once she sort of outed. And again, I think this woman also outed her in a very polite way. It doesn't seem like it was a real, like, cancel culture way. She was just like, oh, by the

[Lizzie Logan]

way, I know her.

[Dana Schwartz]

She used to talk gibberish. Yeah. The language was sort of. Now they realize it's a combination of gibberish and Romani words. And technically, because this is right after the Napoleonic War and impostering was an actual crime under British law, but I mean, because they're scared of spies during the war, so, like, you're not allowed to be an imposter. Okay. So what she's doing is against the law, but she isn't punished, which is, like, kind of cool. And what really happens, the person.

[Lizzie Logan]

Too pretty.

[Dana Schwartz]

Too pretty. But really, it was just like, well, this was all in good fun. And who everyone makes fun of is sort of the Bristol elites for believing that they were hosting a princess.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, yes.

[Dana Schwartz]

Like, look at these stupid rich people in Bristol who were so amused and, like, patting themselves on the back for having a royal guest.

[Lizzie Logan]

It's like when you see roundups of really, really drunk people who thought they met celebrities.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

And it's just someone who took a picture with like a redheaded guy and was like, I met Ed Sheeran. And it's like, it's not Ed Sheeran.

[Dana Schwartz]

It. Exactly. Everyone is laughing at the people around her and, like, kind of give her a pass, I think. Mr. Nora, Mr. Worrell's bank collapses, probably because everyone's like, oh, yeah, this guy's terrible judgment.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. I wouldn't trust him with my money.

[Dana Schwartz]

No. And again, maybe he's a cruel drunk. According to some sources, Mrs. Worrell, his wife, who was born in America, I think, feels bad because there's a lot of negative publicity around Mary now and arranges for her to travel to Philadelphia, possibly to escape the backlash. Basically, once she comes to America, she starts a show, she becomes like a performer. Very P.T. barnum style.

[Lizzie Logan]

Okay.

[Dana Schwartz]

But a little earlier. And so some of the things that she says, I will say are not true because she is saying them on stage.

[Lizzie Logan]

Right.

[Dana Schwartz]

But according to lore, allegedly when she was on the ship to America, a storm blew her off course and they came so close to St. Helena, where Napoleon was being held captive, that she took a small boat and rowed it on shore and met him. And he was enchanted by her and possibly became his mistress.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, funny.

[Dana Schwartz]

Maybe, Maybe not.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, probably not. Feel like we'd know.

[Dana Schwartz]

Known liar. Tell story.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

But amusing.

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[Dana Schwartz]

So in the US she tries to kind of capitalize on her fame and and appear on stage as Caribou. The thinking is that Americans are still smarting from the War of 1812. And so the idea is like, oh, aren't you gonna be entertained by this woman who fooled these dumb British people? And I also kind of think it's interesting how nowadays if someone is like, quote unquote, canceled, they kind of do their, like, villain arc tour.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes.

[Dana Schwartz]

And the way they try to capitalize on that notoriety for money and public with that publicity is happening a hundred years, 200 years ago.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, yeah. You would just, like, write a tell all book.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

This is. This is her tell all book.

[Dana Schwartz]

This is her tell all book.

[Lizzie Logan]

This is her going on Call her daddy.

[Dana Schwartz]

She's going on call her daddy. Except she's going on the Philadelphia stage. She writes a letter back to the worlds saying that it's really hard to be a celebrity. Just like her notoriety. Like, it's not like, oh, it's so hard to be famous, but, like, it's very uncomfortable the way everyone knows me, I don't like living here. And in 1824. So a handful of years later, she comes back to Britain, and then her life becomes pretty normal. In 1828, she's living as a widow, which is possibly not true. Maybe she just is living as a widow with the last name of a cousin, Mary Burgess. So it seems like she just sort of took on a fake name to avoid the notoriety from all of this. Okay. She marries a man named Richard Baker, which is why sometimes, if you see stories about her, she's referenced as Mary Baker. She gives birth to a daughter, Marianne. And in 1929, so little over a decade after all of this, she's making a living selling leeches to a Bristol.

[Lizzie Logan]

This is 1829.

[Dana Schwartz]

1829. Thank you.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

1829, she is making a living selling leeches to the Bristol Infirmary Hospital. Which is a thing that you need to do. Yeah, these hospitals need leeches.

[Lizzie Logan]

They gotta get them leeches for the

[Dana Schwartz]

blood and the humors. Someone has to collect those leeches. And apparently she's making a respectable living. But she is still embarrassed about her notoriety. Children would run after her, calling Caribou. It's kind of like when a person who was on a sitcom then works at Trader Joe's.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yes.

[Dana Schwartz]

Because she's just the leech lady. She's just trying to have a respectable job with her husband and child. But that kind of embarrassment of this youthful summer is by all accounts, making her very uncomfortable. But she lives until her 70s. She dies around 72 or 73 years old on Christmas Eve, buried in Bristol in an unmarked grave. Cause they were very poor. And then this is like the very sad part about her story is her daughter takes up the family leech business and lives alone with a bunch of cats for the rest of her life until she dies in a fire in 1900. Oh, yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

I mean, congrats on having a lot of cats. We love cats.

[Dana Schwartz]

We love cats.

[Lizzie Logan]

But that's very sad.

[Dana Schwartz]

It just is a very strange, sad, anticlimactic ending. Again, because she lives for decades after where it's like she really shined very bright this summer. Where she was in the news and on everyone's lips and then tried to capitalize on it in this show in America that wasn't that successful. Came back and tried to live a normal life, was sort of haunted by her reputation, and then did the best she could.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, it. A little bit. I mean, I think that taking advantage of stereotypes aside, I find her quote unquote crime, like mostly Harmless. Yeah. And like, kind of fun.

[Dana Schwartz]

She's also not imitating a specific racial group. She is speaking nonsense. Yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

But what it a little bit reminds me of is like, there's a comedian, an actor, like, lied about surviving 911 and like, that is just all he's ever going to be known for. And like, it's just done.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, you're the 911 guy.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. Like, that's it. And like, whatever boost he got from that is completely. I hope he enjoyed what like, whatever auditions that anecdote got him.

[Dana Schwartz]

But is over and again, it's like, this is a woman who was possibly mentally ill. I mean, suffered from mental issues after her rheumatism when she was a child, who was impoverished for her entire life. I'm not here to like, cancel this poor woman who was a beggar for most of her life. I think the larger issue to examine is that she was like a symptom of this 19th century British obsession with Eastern exoticism. And they were so amused by what was so obviously a fraud because they wanted to believe it. I read a few scholarly articles about this. And this historian, Matthew Isaac Cohen wrote an article about British Performances of Java, 1811-1822. And specifically he wrote about those years because not to get too deep into history, but if you've heard of like, the East Indies. Dutch East Indies, the Dutch colonized those islands and then England colonized those islands and then they went back. So this was like a period right after British colonization of the Indies. And he wrote that her performance offered, quote, a ground for imperial fantasy. I'm just gonna quote what he says, which is a theatricalized front to a British audience that was keen to believe in the possibility of the other coexisting in their midst. A representative of a foreign culture who was both totally unlike them and also not so distinct as to cause offense. It's like the perfect version of an other, which is like, it's not too many people. You're not gonna over. You're still the mighty Immigration. Not immigration. It's just one quirky princess who happens to be like a beautiful young woman doing fun things for our amusement. It sucks.

[Lizzie Logan]

They couldn't treat Meghan Markle like that. Oh, God, she should have been quirkier.

[Dana Schwartz]

You know who they. You know who they treat like that is Hilaria Baldwin. Realized this.

[Lizzie Logan]

Oh, my God. I would love. I mean, Hilaria Baldwin episode when.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, yeah, let's not get too deep into this, but Ellaria is doing a princess caribou. She realizes, you get more attention somewhere

[Lizzie Logan]

between Hilaria Baldwin and like Rachel Dolezal.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lizzie Logan]

Because it's like, clearly she's not doing it to fit in with a real group of people. She's just doing it for attention.

[Dana Schwartz]

And she's fully just. Again, this is. She's not pretending to be a specific culture. She's saying she's from a made up place and speaking a gibberish language. Yeah, she is definitely using exoticized trappings of. Of Romani people and East Asian. East Asian people. But she's not do. She's specifically imitating a group that no one else is a part of.

[Lizzie Logan]

Really, what this more so reminds me of is like singers who pretend to be really poor growing up or like, you know what I mean? Or like how. I mean, we talk all the time about how artists always have to embellish their backstories and present themselves as like, really unusual and coming from some unexpected place when it's like, no, you just went to Idyllwild.

[Dana Schwartz]

Yeah, you don't. No one wants to be an artist who grew up in Brentwood.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, but it's like you could get a bunch of face tattoos and now you're interesting and different and we want to listen to you rap.

[Dana Schwartz]

I mean, that's the interesting thing is like, she knew as a beggar that she would get more attention by being distinct and different. And she was completely correct. She became so famous in this one summer that we are still talking about her.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

And I think that the person who should be in trouble, the bad guy of this episode isn't necessarily her. It's the system that did that. What I kind of find interesting is there's been like a slate of projects where she's sort of just the ingenue. Not even like an unlikable female character. Like, there's a 1994 movie starring Phoebe Cates.

[Lizzie Logan]

That is such good casting.

[Dana Schwartz]

Well, here's the also really interesting thing. Kate's is half Chinese. Filipino.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah. Because she's a little bit ethnically ambiguous, but also just like a drop dead hottie.

[Dana Schwartz]

Drop dead hottie. No one talked about the fact that she was, you know, East Asian when they were making that movie. That was not relevant. She was just red. She was a 90s, I guess I

[Lizzie Logan]

should say she reads ethnically ambiguous. I'm not saying that Phoebe Cates herself is just like an ambiguous blob in the world.

[Dana Schwartz]

No, I think what's interesting is like,

[Lizzie Logan]

obviously she's like a real person.

[Dana Schwartz]

90s Phoebe Cates was just white yes. That's just like, you see her, you're like, white lady. Yeah. But what I do find interesting is the fact that she actually is closer to what quote, unquote, Caribou was pretending to be. This is, by all accounts, not a very good movie. You can watch a trailer. I watch a trailer for it on YouTube. Apparently, Laura Benanti, not ethnically ambiguous, to the best of my knowledge, hosted a workshop for a musical version in 2004. And then in 2016, there was an off West End musical about her.

[Lizzie Logan]

Amazing.

[Dana Schwartz]

Which I kind of do feel like maybe.

[Lizzie Logan]

Maybe the Brits need to reckon with this a little bit.

[Dana Schwartz]

But that's it. I'm like the 1994 version. I read the Wikipedia and I watched the trailer. I did not watch the movie because my time is very limited. But it's very much sort of like a fairy tale version of this story where there's kind of no bad guys. And it's absolutely not reckoning with, like, racial othering. Yeah. That's just not what that movie is about. But I do think there is. If you are going to make a piece of art about Princess Caribou, that does seem to be the thing that you need to touch on, because otherwise there's just not a lot of There there. Yeah. It is just quirky that a random girl put on a turban and started acting insane and an entire town fell in love with her and she became an international news story.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

That's so funny because she was a princess. Yeah. I mean, you also wonder, how long did she think she was gonna pull this off?

[Lizzie Logan]

Also, like, what was the, like, girl, you gotta stash away your money. Like, you gotta have an exit plan.

[Dana Schwartz]

You know what the exit plan should have been if I were her?

[Lizzie Logan]

Get married.

[Dana Schwartz]

You have to. You have to phase out the accent. It's raw. Have you seen that, Ross, on Friends?

[Lizzie Logan]

Many times.

[Dana Schwartz]

If you start with an accent, you have to phase it out.

[Lizzie Logan]

She, quote, unquote, learns English.

[Dana Schwartz]

She learns English, stops talking in an accent. And then in like a year, you just. People forget that you are the missing princess. And you're like, oh, yes, my ancestry is quite exotic. And then you marry a rich guy.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, marry a rich guy.

[Dana Schwartz]

That would have, I guess, been my plan if I had been forced into a caribou situation. But she really. It was. This con did not last long. I mean, it lasted about two months.

[Lizzie Logan]

One special summer.

[Dana Schwartz]

One special summer.

[Lizzie Logan]

One amazing, wild summer.

[Dana Schwartz]

That is the story of Princess Caribou. A story about how we love sexy Dumb ladies from foreign lands or smart smart, Possibly smart ladies acting very dumb and childlike.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah.

[Dana Schwartz]

Lizzy Logan, where can the good people find you?

[Lizzie Logan]

You can talk to us @hooksthepodcast on Instagram. We love chatting.

[Dana Schwartz]

We love chatting followers.

[Lizzie Logan]

Yeah, go ahead, do it. Doesn't hurt. And Dana, what about you?

[Dana Schwartz]

Hoaxthepodcastmail.com I will get to your email sometimes a little slowly, but I do read all the emails. And Dana Schwartz on Instagram and TikTok with reezies. And I will also beg you if you're a listener of the show, please please pre order a copy of the book. The Arcane Arts Pre orders are the most important thing in the book world. They tell a publisher that this book is worth caring about and putting in bookstores. So if you like anything I'm doing, please pre order that book. This podcast is free. So it is.

[Lizzie Logan]

And if you like it, share it with a friend.

[Dana Schwartz]

Share it with a friend.

[Lizzie Logan]

Send it to someone.

[Dana Schwartz]

Thanks for listening.

[Lizzie Logan]

Please Hoax responsibly.

[Dana Schwartz]

Bye.

[Lizzie Logan]

Hoax is a production of I Heart Podcasts. Our hosts are Dana Schwartz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima El Kayali and producers Noams Griffin and Jesse Funk. Our theme music was composed by Lane Montgomery. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

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[Sheba Cat Food Ad Host]

Here's the truth. You could literally be adored by everyone and then come home and still get completely ignored by your own cat. It's classic cat behavior, but new Shiba Premium Puree is a lickable treat that changes all that. They're protein rich, made with bone broth, and have the smooth, creamy texture cats go crazy for, especially when it's hand fed. Yeah, it's more than a treat. It's a fast pass to favorite human status. So feed your cat Sheba and go from totally ignored to truly adored in just 12 days, guaranteed or your money back. Learn [e-mail] this is an iHeart podcast.

[Dana Schwartz]

Guaranteed human.