Transcript
Who Is the Mysterious Princess Caraboo?
A mysterious woman walks into a small English village speaking a language nobody understands. She says her name is Princess Caraboo: royalty from a faraway island, kidnapped by pirates and shipwrecked near Bristol. Soon, doctors, newspapers, and wealthy hosts are all drawn into her story. But the bigger the legend grows, the harder it becomes to know who is fooling whom.
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors. Edited transcripts replace generated versions when they are available.
00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.
00:09You know why people add water to scotch?
00:13It's not to dilute it.
00:15It's to get it to open up, to know it better.
00:20Modern understanding is that high alcohol concentration suppresses certain aromatic compounds.
00:26But when you add a little bit of water, volatile compounds become easier to detect.
00:32Especially the phenols associated with the smoky notes or the esters associated with the fruity notes.
00:40At high concentration, ethanol can dominate the whole sensory experience.
00:45Whatever story the drink's trying to tell is lost under that burn signal.
00:52When you add water, it reduces that masking effect.
00:57In other words, adding just a few drops of water can make the smell of whiskey more expressive, which changes how that whiskey is perceived before you even taste it.
01:08Now, smell is a special sense.
01:11Smell is the only sense that travels directly into parts of the limbic system, including the amygdala, your so-called lizard brain, and the hippocampus, the part that connects smells to memory.
01:25And once your brain knows the lay of the land, it begins making connections between what you're feeling and other moments in your life.
01:35Smell is your bridge to that furnace in the first house you remember, your last family vacation before you left home, your first kiss.
01:46Consciously or unconsciously, you now have a relationship with this drink.
01:51And all of that happens deep inside your brain before the booze even hits your stomach.
01:58Is it any wonder that people form such a personal relationship with their favorite whiskeys and scotch?
02:05Tribes, if you will.
02:08Now, compare that experience to a shot of whiskey.
02:14The difference between the pomp and circumstance given to the tasting notes on a glass of scotch compared to the working-class ritual of a shot slammed back.
02:23I mean, don't get me wrong.
02:25People love a shot.
02:26But remember, you're playing with an entirely separate set of brain chemistry.
02:31First, there's the alcohol itself.
02:34Your brain instantly reads that as important.
02:37That alone can trigger the reward system in anticipation of the warm glow that comes after.
02:42But this is the part that says, yo, pay attention.
02:45But just as important is that burn.
02:50Hot, sharp, chest-kicking sensation.
02:52It's not really flavor in the poetic sense, but more your body registering this chemical irritation.
02:59Long before you're even picking up the notes of caramel or smoke, your brain's already dealing with heat, intensity, impact.
03:08That feeling of a shot burning down your throat, that's how I want you to think of a short con. Primal. Exciting. Immediate.
03:16Short cons like the white van scam we talked about in the very first episode of this program are all about the excitement, the feeling you get when your brain believes you're about to get a reward.
03:30Here it comes, boys.
03:31The immediacy is why the short con artist has to create a crisis or an opportunity.
03:37There needs to be a vanishing window for you to make the most out of it.
03:41Like that shot, it's gotta be right now.
03:45Set up, reward, let's go.
03:48Meanwhile, a long con is something else entirely.
03:54I want you to think of a long con as that opened up scotch.
03:58A long con tickles at the edge of your memories, awakens something in you that you need to sit with in order to get the full effect.
04:09The kind of emotional triggers that beg your brain to connect this situation to others in your life.
04:16In a long con, the less you say, the better.
04:20All those half-remembered associations, that's just more room for the mark to tell themselves their own story.
04:28That's when you invent a reason to profit.
04:33It's the mark who figures out how they can pay you.
04:38But it never really feels like we're lying to ourselves, does it?
04:46We certainly don't notice it, just like we don't notice that we're making friends with that glass of scotch. It just happens.
04:53Somewhere beneath the threshold of cognitive awareness.
04:57And trust me, nobody can deceive us like we can deceive ourselves.
05:04For example, in a lonely roadside in Regency, England, we find a young girl wearing a turban.
05:14She's well-mannered, relatively clean, has straight white teeth.
05:19She doesn't seem to belong.
05:23And strangely, she speaks no language understood by anyone in the relatively multilingual port town of Bristol.
05:32Investigations reveal that she claims to be captured royalty, snatched from a sun-soaked faraway land.
05:42Well, the whole town's got a situation on her hand.
05:48She's got to be cared for.
05:49She needs to be fed.
05:50Most importantly, she must be understood.
05:52At least, those are the thoughts of the woman who brings her into her house, hoping to do right by this pretty young refugee.
06:03But is this girl who she claims to be?
06:07And if this girl is a con artist, what's she after?
06:12And can she get it before she's caught?
06:15This is the story of swashbuckling honor, high-class hubris, and a linguistic puzzle so dense only the most elite from the highest of ivory towers can solve it.
06:30A story of national headlines that feed a populace who cannot get enough.
06:36The story of the moment everyone finds out the truth.
06:43Cons don't fool us because we're stupid.
06:47They fool us because we're human.
06:50And the tale of Princess Caraboo might just be...
06:54the world's greatest con.
06:56To understand our story, we need to wrap our minds around the kind of narratives that were popular at this exact period of time. 19th century England.
07:27Right now, England is the capital of the United Kingdom.
07:31It is the center of the known universe.
07:34And it's just getting bigger.
07:36Improved cartography tools means that ships can confidently go farther into uncharted territories.
07:41Trade lines mean that foreign goods are showing up on English shores.
07:46And most importantly, cheap paper, better printing, and copperplate engravings mean that these illustrated stories from afar, these wonderful exotic foreign lands...
07:57they are captivating the imaginations of anyone who knows how to read.
08:04The closest way I can express this phenomenon is imagine if all the tales that we love from Star Trek, sci-fi, fantasy, westerns weren't just in the imaginations of authors, but living remnants of actual adventures just over the horizon.
08:21And of course, the pioneer of this kind of literature is...
08:29Oh, where is it?
08:30Ah, here we go: Captain James Cook.
08:32Attend ye, readers to the lamentable catastrophe that befell Captain James Cook, navigator of oceans, surveyor of cop...
08:44We gotta skip to the good part. Where's the end?
08:50Ah, here's the important part.
08:51Cook now attempts to make a final exit, only to be stopped by the king he kidnapped.
08:57Cook, I just need to get to my ship.
09:01You tore me from my people.
09:03I just need to walk away, not just for me, for you, for them.
09:08Your ship will leave without you. Cook is struck.
09:12Then tell them that Cook sailed farther than any map, but it was Britannia that never bowed.
09:24Did you feel that?
09:28That hypnotic pull to someplace else?
09:32And this story has it all.
09:35This is the story of a real man who made real achievements.
09:41The real person, Cook, dies heroically, romantically, tragically on the beautiful sun-soaked shores of an island nobody in Europe knew about until he discovered it.
09:51Writings like these, Cook's writings, they spurred a boom in both fiction and nonfiction, all centered around the exotic.
10:00Fantastical tales, strange, primitive, exciting, arousing worlds, completely untethered from anything Europeans had ever known.
10:10This tale of Cook, that's a good one.
10:15It's one of your favorites, in fact.
10:19That's one you read over and over again, because in our story, you are Elizabeth Worrell, a matron of high society right here in Bristol, England.
10:29You're in your late 40s, two adult sons, got them out of the house, and here we are, Tuesday. It's gray outside. Another gray day. Oh, it's raining. That's neat.
10:44No wonder you keep going back to those books, those humid jungles, the clear water, the white sand, the strong forearms.
10:57I mean, sure, it's lawless out there, but what has civilization done for us?
11:04I mean, England just won a war, and here it is, 1816.
11:09It's miserable out there.
11:11Peace has broken out, and nobody is happy about it.
11:17The country was in recession, revolution was in the air, and the state had made a habit of making examples out of inconvenient people.
11:29Men and women were being sent to Australia for offenses as small as false witness and perjury.
11:36It's in this brittle, charged world that Elizabeth Worrell would first hear about the woman who would change her life forever.
11:46An unidentified young woman, wandering alone, wearing a white blouse and a turban, seemed totally out of it.
11:54No matter what anyone says to her, she just appears oblivious, nonresponsive, speaking gibberish, a walking problem.
12:03Word had it that the girl first fell into the hands of a cobbler's wife, then got passed over to the overseer of the poor.
12:13The overseer offered her a shilling, good money, but she refused. That's weird.
12:19What vagrant refuses good money?
12:21Instead, not with words, but gestures and signs, she asks only to sleep.
12:28The overseer doesn't know what to do with her, so he passes her on to the local parson, a kind, well-read man, who might have maybe an idea of what language she's speaking.
12:41But the parson and his wife, they can't make anything out of her one way or the other, no matter how many dialects they read from.
12:50And the girl, she doesn't look particularly foreign.
12:53She's got white skin, black hair.
12:55Her teeth are white and straight.
12:58And her affect, her whole attitude, it's curiously settled for somebody without a friend, food, lodging, directions, papers.
13:08But there's just something about her.
13:11The parson takes her to the only home in the area that could help crack the case.
13:20This place has a large library, connections to local government.
13:23They even have a Greek manservant.
13:24Welcome to the Knoll, the home of Sam and Elizabeth Worrell.
13:30The husband, Sam, is the town clerk of Bristol.
13:34By reputation, he's a violent drunk, but also a member of the Bristol elite at a time when regular corruption was becoming less tolerated.
13:43Elizabeth didn't bother herself with such drudgery.
13:45She's mostly known in town for her good temper and her love of the exotic.
13:52Which brings us to this moment, the moment Elizabeth first sees this strange girl.
14:00Her manner so still, her eyes so inquisitive, like there's a story just waiting to be told.
14:10Their Greek manservant interrogates the girl right in front of them both and comes away convinced she's a gypsy.
14:19A gypsy, you say?
14:21For Elizabeth, this is fascinating.
14:23Amongst intellectual circles, gypsies are the hot new thing.
14:28The 18th century taught educated Britons to romanticize the noble savage, the supposedly pure, natural human, unspoiled by Western learnings or material life.
14:40In Bristol and Bath, among the literary and philosophical societies Elizabeth swam in, that idea has momentum.
14:48Maybe the exotic didn't just live on distant islands.
14:52Maybe it's passing through English lanes. all along.
14:56Elizabeth could see it now.
14:58Wood smoke from a clearing, a painted caravan, brown-skinned children with bright eyes and gold earrings crouched around a fire. Nonsense, says Sam.
15:08And he cross-examines the girl himself, turns out her pockets, and there! Aha! You see? Outdated currency.
15:16That alone is a crime, may I remind you.
15:19And after a long hard look, even Sam had to concede, this girl is very pretty.
15:27She is very, very pretty.
15:29And she certainly doesn't look like a common vagrant.
15:34Elizabeth makes the call.
15:36The girl will be taken to a local inn for the night.
15:43They will revisit her fate the next morning.
15:45As she's being escorted to the inn, this strange girl lights up at the sight of a pineapple painted on a sign.
15:55She points, calls it anana.
15:56All right, that's weird. Anana?
15:58Once inside the inn, she gestures for tea.
16:02But when she's handed it, she bows her head and prays before drinking it.
16:09After finishing, she's offered another cup.
16:11She accepts, but insists on washing her own cup before taking it.
16:17After that, she prays again.
16:19At night, she's led to a room where she tries to sleep on the floor.
16:26According to the innkeeper, he had to demonstrate how a bed works before she finally lays down and dozes off.
16:33All these stories drift back to Elizabeth the next morning.
16:37Despite it being Good Friday, the vicar comes down with books from strange lands.
16:42Running through them, the girl shows a particular fascination with anything Chinese.
16:46She also manages to indicate something about her past, that she came to England on a boat.
16:53Well, that's enough for Elizabeth.
16:56This girl doesn't belong at some inn.
17:00She has to return back to the knoll where they can solve this mystery.
17:05Later that day, Elizabeth pushes the trying to get one piece of information.
17:09She points to herself and says, and then writes it down and tries to hand the stranger a pen. She refuses.
17:20Instead, she points to herself and answers.
17:22Elizabeth is thrilled to be solving this mystery, but she begins to get criticism from her husband about their new house guest.
17:31See, she's busy with her intellectual and poetry societies.
17:35The patriarch of the family is navigating the increasingly treacherous world of public trust.
17:41See, don't you remember?
17:43Peace just broke out. Everyone's nervous.
17:45Sam owns a regional bank right here in town, the kind of bank that's been going belly up recently.
17:52It only takes one little spook of the wrong kind of gossip and everyone will pull their coin from his bank.
18:00And when that happens, everything would fall.
18:02So Elizabeth, your project, your girl, the one our Greek servant keeps calling a fraud, we've got to do something about her.
18:10He makes the decision to send Caraboo into town to meet with the mayor himself.
18:15If he determines her to be a beggar, then that's that.
18:20So the next day, Easter Sunday, Sam and Caraboo head to Bristol.
18:26There they meet the mayor.
18:28He inspects her and is charmed. Enchanted, really.
18:31Sam argues she should remain in Bristol until her embassy could be found and arrangements made to send her back home.
18:42And the mayor agrees.
18:43So Caraboo is sent to the local hospital, the usual way station for the poor and displaced.
18:50Imagine an overcrowded and violent FEMA camp nowadays.
18:53A far cry from the luxury of the knoll.
19:01Three days into our story, good Friday through Easter Sunday, a girl's found on the side of the road, doesn't say a word and is now in a purgatory for the pathetic.
19:23But word keeps spreading.
19:24This town is fascinated by her.
19:27The story continues to spread from her time at the inn and the knoll.
19:32There's a strange, beautiful foreigner in town and no one knows where she's from.
19:37And she isn't telling.
19:38Visitors crowd into this poor house to look at mysterious beauty and guess her origin.
19:45Guessing games of language, Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian.
19:49No one can place her.
19:51By Monday, Elizabeth can take this no more.
19:59She removes Caraboo from the poor house and installs her in Sam's flat near his office in Bristol.
20:05And most importantly, encourages anyone who might identify her to come and try.
20:10In this parade of foreigners all asking to try her language, we find a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Enes.
20:17Just like everyone else, he speaks a language none of the locals could understand.
20:26But while every other language tried was met with silence, this time Caraboo answers back.
20:31Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
20:36These are the most words this girl has said since she came to town.
20:42Just like that, the code is cracked.
20:45Manuel turns to Worrell and explains this woman is a princess.
20:51A princess from an island called Javasu.
20:55She was kidnapped by pirates.
20:57And she's only in England because she escaped her captors and swam ashore to Bristol. Sam is ecstatic. This changes everything.
21:06He brings Caraboo back to the Knoll.
21:15This exotic beauty just went from PR disaster to jackpot.
21:20Foreign royalty under our roof?
21:22That's exactly the kind of thing we need. Clout. Authority. Validation.
21:27And with the mystery closed, word spreads like wildfire.
21:31That gorgeous stranger in the small village?
21:38She's exotic island royalty.
21:40A wayward princess trying to find her way back home, half a world away.
21:46And have you heard? She's hot.
21:48Yeah, that part's important.
21:50Literally every document about Princess Caraboo gets one detail very, very consistently the same. She's attractive. And so...
21:58All right, gather around, Bristol.
22:01The status games have begun.
22:04As word spreads, Elizabeth's friends flock to the house, bringing objects to test Caraboo's excitement.
22:13Each one hoping to possibly get more clues to her exact origin.
22:18Peppers, semi-precious stones, fans, pieces of coral, a Chinese chain purse, green tea, Chinese puzzles, Indian ink, and Eskimo carving.
22:27Caraboo is excited by many of them, but Chinese things move her most of all.
22:34All the while, her presence alone fans the flames of gossip. Did you hear?
22:42By the nose lake she kneels, anoints her forehead with water, and she prays.
22:47I heard she's an impressive archer.
22:49She was running along with a quiver over her shoulder.
22:53She turned with the bow, held low, released two arrows accurately while on the move.
22:58I heard she performs a war dance, decorating herself with flowers and feathers.
23:02She struck a gong as she made solemn progress through the garden with a tambourine.
23:07And when she's alone, she swims naked in the pond. Elizabeth is enchanted.
23:12All of her fantasies, her visions of far-off strangeness, they'd come to life and stepped out into her own garden.
23:23Of course, not everyone is convinced.
23:26Elizabeth's son calls her a fraud.
23:30Caraboo answers in one of her nearest approaches to English. Caraboo, no fraud.
23:38The servants went about making up their own minds.
23:41The housekeeper who sleeps in the same room as Caraboo reports that Caraboo doesn't talk in her sleep, at least not in English.
23:51On another occasion, tests and traps are laid out for Caraboo.
23:55On one occasion, a staff member runs into the room shouting, fire, only to get a blank expression in return.
24:01Elizabeth begins a record of Caraboo's language.
24:04Looking at the sky, Caraboo says, salmon.
24:07Touching the earth, she says, tarsa.
24:10A stone is tori.
24:12The sun is samatu.
24:15And as best Elizabeth can tell, these words, this vocabulary remains consistent.
24:23The visitors keep coming, fellow socialites, academics, the business elite.
24:28One night, they're all gathered, asking Caraboo questions, showing her artifacts, and something clicks.
24:38Caraboo tells the assembled group what she calls her al-qaeda, her destiny.
24:45Her father, she says, is Chinese.
24:48Her mother is Malay.
24:51She grew up on an island called Javasu.
24:58In an earlier interrogation, her name had been given as Sisumandu.
25:02Well, that was her old name.
25:05She had been renamed Caraboo to celebrate a great victory won by her father.
25:10His name was Jessimandu, a man of rank and distinction, whose family came from China.
25:17He had four wives and was carried everywhere on the shoulders of three serving men.
25:23Her mother was Malay.
25:24The two argued over Caraboo's religion, but the mother won.
25:28So Caraboo worshiped al-qaeda.
25:30Ah, then came the sorrow.
25:32Her mother had been murdered by cannibals.
25:35Oriental pirates came ashore and kidnapped her.
25:38Jessimandu tried, but failed to rescue her, firing several arrows into the boat that would rip his daughter away from him.
25:52The pirate who took her, his name was Chi-men.
25:56She would not describe what happened aboard his ship, and she seemed visibly distressed around that part of the tale.
26:04After eleven days at sea, another vessel came alongside.
26:08A bounty was offered for her, and she was sold again, this time to a captain named Tapabu.
26:16From there, she described a long circuitous journey, taking many months.
26:21Caraboo said that when her last ship came close enough to the English coast, she jumped overboard and swam ashore.
26:30She found a house with a green door, traded the dress that she had been kidnapped in for a plain black one, and wandered for six weeks before being found in Almondsbury.
26:42Elizabeth feels the air go out of the room.
26:47It's the exact romantic pain she always assumed hid behind those doe's eyes.
26:55Grief made vivid, suffering made glamorous, pain made narrative.
27:00Just like her stories.
27:02Some of the other folks who heard the tale, well, there are doubts.
27:10Caraboo's geography is weak, to put it mildly.
27:18The movements of the ships don't quite make sense.
27:22If she was being bought and sold by pirates, why were they docking so regularly?
27:28Why did the story feel so grand?
27:30Elizabeth will have none of this second guessing a girl stolen from her family, brutalized, traded from ship to ship.
27:44Of course, it's imprecise. Trauma explains inconsistency.
27:46And so the legend grows even wider.
27:49Four days later, Caraboo vanishes, all of her presents left abandoned in a room.
27:58A day later, she returns.
28:03Through sign, she explains that she had gone to recover a sack of European clothes that she had buried, you know, so that the Macratous couldn't take them.
28:16Oh, look at this thing.
28:18She came back feverish, teeth chattering, lips trembling.
28:22Just glad to have Caraboo back.
28:25Elizabeth buys some materials so that Caraboo can fashion clothing from her homeland.
28:29Caraboo's thrilled, fashions herself a new dress, a new turban.
28:34And around this time, she sits for a portrait from Bristol's best painter.
28:40Meanwhile, in the middle of May, those handwriting samples, the ones that were sent to Oxford and reviewed by the three leading language experts, they came back, all three with the same conclusion.
28:52This writing from Princess Caraboo, it was not foreign. It was bullshit.
28:56How can they get this so wrong?
28:59I thought they were supposed to be experts.
29:06I'll tell you who's actually an expert.
29:11Meet Dr. Wilkinson, a local authority on, well, according to him, pretty much everything.
29:15Now, Dr. Wilkinson, Dr. Wilkinson knows his stuff.
29:19He is utterly charmed by Caraboo.
29:23He stakes his reputation on the fact that this writing is legitimate.
29:29He also praises her elegance, praises her grace and praises, wouldn't you know it, her beauty.
29:36And he commits to his findings, publishing about Caraboo's authenticity and regional papers wherever he can.
29:44And with that, Caraboo is no longer just a Bristol curiosity or a high society rumor. No.
29:51Abu is a bona fide celebrity, someone known to anyone who reads anything.
29:57And even the skeptics come up with new theories.
30:01Well, perhaps not an actual princess, maybe she's just a confused Circassian from near the Black Sea.
30:10It's not exactly Java, not Fiji.
30:13And make a Chinese pirate a bit curious in the story.
30:18Whatever, the attention intensifies further, still academics, curiosity seekers, believers, skeptics, each one with their own agenda, their own story, their own theory, all raising the profile of Caraboo at that moment, when the whole world recognizes the story, the voice and the face of Caraboo. She vanishes.
30:40And this time she doesn't come back.
30:43While all of Bristol's on a manhunt, let's take a moment to consider the behavior of crowds.
31:01In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt says that humans are 90% chimp and 10% chimp.
31:11And in our story, up until this point, every single character, every single member of the crowd has had the same shared job to figure out where did this girl come from?
31:38And the answer is, she's a girl.
31:42Now, for some of the folks, that question means where in all of this wide, exotic world did this princess come from?
31:51For other characters, the question meant what dark, slimy corner of Bristol had she been hiding in?
31:56But still, as long as Caraboo's origins were a mystery, everyone had the same job.
32:04But once the crowd finds out where she's from, they'll encounter a new question.
32:10What are they going to do with her?
32:15And this is where mob mentality, where crowd dynamics really matter.
32:19When we think about mob mentality, we picture an ecstatic flow state, being lost in the crowd, losing your mind.
32:30Most of the time, people in groups are not becoming less moral, they're becoming more loyal, loyal to the mission of the group.
32:43Psychologists attribute this behavior to a few different things.
32:47First of all, anonymity.
32:49When your share of the blame seems small, many of your behavioral breaks come off. Second, emotional contagion.
32:55People copy each other's behaviors.
32:57We accept the norms faster than we realize.
33:01Fear, excitement, outrage, joy, all of that is infectious.
33:05All of it moves.
33:08If you've been in a crowd at a sporting event, you felt that wave.
33:15And third, the diffusion of responsibility.
33:17If everybody's doing it, nobody feels fully responsible for it having been done.
33:23A crowd doesn't make people reckless.
33:27A crowd makes people act like members of a tribe.
33:32And there's no one set moral framework for a tribe.
33:37When a crowd feels a job that needs to get done, they self-organize.
33:42They begin a movement that catches fire all on its own.
33:45Think about Rudy, the classic tale of the undersized Notre Dame player who finally got his chance to play at the end of the season.
33:55I got to tell you, it's just occurred to me what the student body has been chanting for the last two or three minutes.
34:01It's the name, Rudy.
34:02There was no announcement to the crowd saying that Rudy is a poor sad sack who tries really hard.
34:09That story self-propagated entirely on its own.
34:11And the crowd, as a unit, went about taking on the job of making things right.
34:19Let the kid play.
34:24Research shows that people are deeply drawn to the story of disadvantaged strivers, especially when a contest feels unfair.
34:34And once a whole stadium locks into that feeling, becomes contagious.
34:42That emotion becomes shared.
34:44The crowd starts to experience itself as one body with one mission.
34:49The 10% B instinct takes over.
34:52But that same machinery can turn the other way.
34:57For example, let's go back to that story of Captain James Cook.
35:04The romanticized surface level version simply says he died a hero on a foreign shore, a victim of a culture he doesn't understand.
35:15And that's true, partly.
35:17But underneath, understand those same crowd dynamics that worked in favor for Rudy are already working against Cook.
35:26That extremely loyal crowd becomes even more loyal in the heat of the moment and leaves Cook dead.
35:36In the story, Cook had already mapped the island and was about to finally head back home to England when a technicality occurred.
35:47Damage from one of his ships forced him to come back to shore, at which point he discovered just how decayed relations had become.
35:56There was already friction between his expedition and the islanders.
36:00This is the moment when one of the islanders stole one of Cook's boats.
36:05Cook is obviously chagrined, so he responds tit for tat with a little tactic that to him feels practical.
36:11Cook decides you take one of our boats.
36:14We'll just capture your local king for a brief sojourn.
36:18We'll hold on to him as collateral until that boat comes back.
36:22Now, understanding Cook's mind, this is not an overreaction. It's not random.
36:26It's simply a parlay, a standard operating procedure to make sure everybody gets what they need.
36:33Cook's already done this several times in Europe, hell, even other parts of the Pacific.
36:39It's just hard bargaining on a new frontier.
36:43That's all we're dealing with here.
36:45At that flashpoint moment to the islanders, this foreign captain, this interloper swooped in and publicly carried off their king, their living God in human form.
36:55This is the ultimate betrayal, a betrayal of honor, a betrayal of respect.
37:02And by an actor that doesn't have the standing he thinks he has.
37:09One local begins screaming, another joins in.
37:12Soon, Cook's men are getting defensive.
37:14And before you know it, Cook is beaten to death.
37:20Balance, a repayment of shame, the group is telling each individual unit that they are writing things.
37:29Order is being restored.
37:34And once that narrative takes root, all the familiar forces line up behind the act, the shared identity, fear of exclusion, diffusion of responsibility, emotional reinforcement, moral certainty, anonymity.
37:49That is the real lesson of mob mentality, the same psychology that lets thousands of strangers carry an underdog to glory can also let a community carry itself into atrocity.
38:05Anyway, the crowd found caraboo, good job, crowd.
38:08Turns out, Dr. Wilkinson himself finds her in the nearby town of Bath and word spreads fast, the famous princess caraboo.
38:24She's here in Bath.
38:26Almost immediately, the crowds become too much.
38:28They move her from the inn where she had been staying to a private house and a familiar scene emerges.
38:36A line of aristocrats come to pay her homage.
38:39New faces seeing and hearing her for the first time.
38:43Men offer large sums of money to help send her back to Java, so they place bank notes in her hands and she lets them fall to the floor as if the very concept of money means nothing to her.
38:59At this moment, Elizabeth arrives. Caraboo stops mid-sentence.
39:02Her eyes brim with tears, her chest heaves with emotion as fast as she can.
39:12Caraboo begins a reasonable explanation.
39:16She had only run away because she had become desperately homesick.
39:21And to understand the full picture, you really need context.
39:26You see, she didn't merely want to see her father back in her island home.
39:32Did she mention she also has a husband? And a child?
39:36Hurt, but determined to look after her surrogate daughter, Elizabeth brings her back to the knoll.
39:44They will survive this together.
39:47They will make this work.
39:49She will make Caraboo happy.
39:51All those academics, all the romantics, all the fame seekers and skeptics, all of them to a man and a woman, no matter what their personal agenda was, they all succeeded in one thing together.
40:08To make Caraboo ever more famous until the arrival of the one person who could break the spell, the one person who knew the truth that Caraboo was a fraud. Meet Mrs. Neal.
40:20Mrs. Neal came to Bridge Street in Bristol.
40:24She'd heard about Caraboo, read the description.
40:28Unfortunately, she says, there is no Princess Caraboo.
40:37There's only a woman named Mary.
40:40Mrs. Neal's story is very straightforward.
40:43In March of that year, a girl in her mid-20s matching Caraboo's description shared a room with the Neals.
40:56She had been intelligent, entertaining and friendly with Mrs. Neal's daughter.
41:00She'd gone to church with them on Sundays.
41:02Oh, she was very much English.
41:04She also would amuse herself and them by occasionally speaking in a silly made up language.
41:10And the last time they had seen her at the beginning of April, she had been wearing a turban exactly like the one now associated with Princess Caraboo.
41:21Elizabeth is gutted but maintains her composure.
41:23Mrs. Worrell, thanks, Mrs. Neal, excuses herself and gently latches the door shut. What to do?
41:39What do we do with this stranger and her story?
41:44Sun breaks on a high summer day in Bristol, England.
41:54Caraboo and Worrell have just arrived at the painter's studio.
42:07For what Caraboo is told will be the final sitting for her portrait.
42:15In through the front door, past the foyer, up the stairs and into the studio. Caraboo gets situated.
42:23Worrell locks the door.
42:25She sits across from Caraboo, making solid eye contact.
42:30Your name is Mary Baker. You're from Devonshire.
42:36You are nothing more than a well-liked creative housemaid.
42:48You have lied to me.
42:52You lied to my husband.
42:54You lied to all of our friends and half of British academic society. It is over.
43:02You need to drop the act.
43:03Caraboo's response is confused, tearful.
43:05She sobs out, Caraboo, Tadi, Madi, Romani.
43:07And then something to the effect of Mother, Father, Irish.
43:13Her invented language melting away as tears stream down her face.
43:20Elizabeth, still composed, drops the hammer.
43:23Mrs. Neal and her daughter are here downstairs right now.
43:30They could be brought upstairs to confront Mary directly.
43:36Caraboo shakes her head.
43:39She slides to the floor, clinging to Elizabeth Worrell's knees.
43:44And at last, in English, in what the notes describe as a strong North Devonshire accent, begs for forgiveness: Please don't send me back to my parents.
44:01Elizabeth, don't cut me off.
44:04And there it is, finality at last. Flat, cold truth.
44:11In those first few seconds, the ones that feel like years, no one moves.
44:26But behind Elizabeth's placid mask, her mind is moving a mile a minute.
44:35What is the fitting consequence of this?
44:39My reputation, the Worrell name is destroyed.
44:43I'm already a national fool, but my husband's bank is going to fail.
44:48This woman needs to go to jail, but then what?
44:54If she fantasizes so much about long boat rides, maybe she could take one all the way to Australia.
45:04No doubt the other convicts would treat her with the hospitality she saw from Qi Min.
45:10Or as grim as the thought is, perhaps this situation requires something more final.
45:16Maybe what's needed is an example to remind the people that the aristocracy will not be humiliated by the insolent working class.
45:26In our next episode, Worrell unveils her decision, one that will have echoes for a hundred years.
45:34And we reveal all the details of how a poor girl from the country became a princess in what just might be...
45:43The World's Greatest Con!