“Princess Caraboo” was an impostor who appeared in the English town of Almondsbury, Gloucestershire, in 1817. A young woman wearing unusual clothes and speaking a language she had made up, she pretended to be a native of a fictional island called Javasu in the Indian Ocean, and to have been captured by pirates and escaped by jumping into the English Channel. Fortuitously aided by a well-traveled Portuguese sailor and fellow bullshit artist who claimed to be able to translate her language, she gave vivid descriptions of her supposed life back home, practiced a made-up religion, and displayed behaviors like exotic dancing, swimming and fencing, at which she was apparently very skilled. She was taken in by a local magistrate’s family, had her portrait painted, and received many distinguished visitors, fooling everybody who encountered her and causing excited speculation about exactly what culture she came from.

Her fame was her undoing: when a description of her vocabulary and habits was published in a newspaper, a boarding-house keeper recognized her as a former lodger, and when confronted, she eventually confessed to being Mary Willcocks, born in Devonshire, an uneducated former servant and vagrant with a history of eccentric behavior and dubious claims. An account published later in 1817 includes a list of her vocabulary, a mix of gibberish and a few Romani words, which she was said to use with complete consistency. She may have been a fraud (and, by modern standards, a cultural appropriator), but I think it’s worth considering her obvious talents, sheer audacity, and ingenuity in finding an escape from the roles society would have imposed on her.

“Poor, visionary, deluded girl!! But what shall be said of all the learned travellers, the philosophers, the cognoscenti, the blue stocking ladies, and the numerous dupes of various denominations, who were so completely juggled and out-witted?”