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Topic Last Updated on 17-07-2024
A Stranger Appears
The story begins in Gloucestershire, England, in the year 1817. A young woman, wearing a strange dress and speaking a language that no one could understand, was found wandering the streets of a small village near Bristol. There were no documents or records to help identify the stranger. The villagers attempted to figure out her name through gestures. In response, the stranger kept pointing to herself and exclaiming, “Caraboo!”
The magistrate of Bristol gave the young woman a room. Rumors about her mysterious origins began to spread throughout England, infused with intriguing tidbits: she regularly prayed, bowing down before an unknown deity, refused to drink tea twice from the same cup, and tried to sleep on the floor instead of the bed that was provided to her.
Efforts to Unveil Princess Caraboo’s Mysterious Origins
Concerned members of the public tried to identify the woman’s home country, showing her illustrated books with pictures of foreign lands, but she didn’t recognize any of them, except for a few Chinese paintings and statues. However, she didn’t look like she came from China: she had European features, and her feet were not bound according to Chinese custom. The villagers eventually decided that the woman must have visited China on her journey. She seemed to indicate that she traveled by ship from the south.
Upon seeing a still life painting of a pineapple, Caraboo grew excited and exclaimed repeatedly: “Anana! Anana!,” pointing to the fruit. Evidently, the fruit was familiar to her, so people assumed that pineapples grew in her homeland.
In the case of a pineapple, this adventuress quickly grasped the idea without any special training. In English, the fruit is called “pineapple,” but in many other languages, it is called “ananas” This is no coincidence: languages often borrow words from each other (for example, the word ananas originally comes from the Tupi language). Caraboo could only speak English and knew a few words from other languages, so she couldn’t have known much about the linguistic process of borrowing, but she guessed correctly.
The woman convinced not only the romantically-inclined residents of Bristol but also the most skeptical of pundits. Why?
Her Lost Majesty
Newspapers began to circulate the story of Caraboo, attracting many curious polyglots and travelers to the magistrate’s house. One of them suggested that Caraboo was not a name but the woman’s birthplace. Another noted that her mannerisms resembled those of Circassian women, although neither her clothes nor her language appeared to be Circassian.
The more people talked to the mysterious stranger, the more complicated the situation became. Her speech incorporated Romani, Malay, and Arabic words, as well as words whose origins could not be determined. And Caraboo didn’t just speak an unknown language; she also wrote in it. The symbols she used resembled Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew scripts.
Caraboo’s speech was not just a combination of incoherent sounds — she had invented an original language with its own vocabulary and pronunciation rules. One of her visitors, Dr. Wilkinson, set out to study her language. Throughout their sessions, Caraboo’s accent remained consistent, and she never confused the meanings of the words she used.
Stills from the film Princess Caraboo (1994). The role of Mary Wilcox-Baker was played by Phoebe Cates.
The Romani words Caraboo used were coin names, but Allah Tallah, the name she had given to her invented god, was most likely adopted from a Muslim native of the Middle East.
The Arrival of Manuel Eynesso
One day, a sailor named Manuel Eynesso came to town. He claimed that he understood the woman’s language and even translated her story. According to him, Caraboo was no ordinary stranger but a highborn lady from the island of Javasu who had been abducted by pirates. Apparently, after a long voyage on their ship, she could not stand the torment of captivity and jumped overboard somewhere off the coast of England. She had swapped her expensive clothes for food and woolen clothes, and that’s when she was eventually found.
It’s not clear whether this sailor was acting as Caraboo’s accomplice or had devised his own scheme. In any case, the “princess” played her role flawlessly and remained nonchalant, even if she was caught off guard by the sudden emergence of a person who “understood” the language known only to her.
