The Book of the Dead (40 page)

Just before appearing from nowhere as Princess Caraboo, she was sacked as a children’s nanny by Mr. and Mrs. Starling, of Islington, for frightening the young Starlings with hair-raising tales of being born in the “East Indies.” Mrs. Starling declared her anecdotes so wild she could “not even begin to recollect a quarter of the girl’s vagaries.” Mary had also set fire to two beds in a week.

A contemporary account of Princess Caraboo’s life noted her remarkable ability to maintain her story in the face of repeated questioning and called her performance “an instance of consummate art and duplicity.” On arriving in Bristol from London, Mary noticed the Breton beggar girls, and copied their dress by adopting a turban. She pretended to be French, but when questioned by a French official, she said she was Spanish. When the inevitable Spaniard was produced, she improvised her own lingo out of her own head.

It now seems clear that her great deception began only to avoid being locked up for the night for vagrancy. Finding herself believed by so many of the good folk of Almondsbury, the temptation to avoid, by any means, a return to her degrading and aimless past must have been impossible to resist. What she lacked in formal education she more than made up for in imagination, quick thinking, and an excellent memory. The local gentry were content to go along with her fantasy rather than betray their own ignorance, and when “experts” on foreign countries were called in to question her, the princess invariably kept a judicious but enigmatic silence. But she listened carefully, squirreling away their overheard conversations to use later. As with Psalmanazar, celebrity changed and calmed her. The adulation of her many admirers seemed to assuage the restlessness and suicidal urges of her youth. She did not find riches with her fame, but maybe she found herself and, with that, the contentment that had eluded her for so long.

For the last thirty years of her life Mary lived a genteel existence, quietly supplying leeches to Bristol Infirmary. Her past only occasionally rose up to embarrass her when local children called out “Caraboo!” She fell dead in the street on Christmas Eve 1864, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her daughter, also called Mary, carried on the leech business, living alone in a house full of cats, where she died in a fire in 1900.

Take away the pretensions to royal blood, and Princess Caraboo’s story is echoed a generation later in the adventures of
Louis de Rougemont
(1847–1921). He came to public notice via a series of fantastic articles published in London’s
Wide World
magazine, in which he recalled his thirty years in the wilds of Papua New Guinea and the Australian Outback.

His story went like this: Originally Swiss, he had been shipwrecked in 1864 en route to northern Australia on a Singaporean pearling boat. Rescued by his dog Bruno, who dragged him from the depths by his long hair and then towed him ashore by his tail, he spent two years on an uninhabited island, keeping fit by doing gymnastics on the sand and taking rides on the backs of turtles. He steered the turtles by poking his left or right toe into the appropriate eye according to which direction he wanted to travel and then ate them, using their blood to nourish the corn he planted in their upturned shells. Liberated by some passing natives in a canoe, he went back to their village, where he married an Aboriginal tribeswoman called Yamba and was treated as a god. He was given the name Winnimah (meaning “lightning”) because he could shoot down birds in midflight with his bow and arrow. He would lead the tribe into battle against other villages, wearing stilts and dressed as a wizard. At sea he was a fearless sailor, once killing a whale single-handedly and on another occasion wrestling a crocodile.

De Rougemont’s articles did not go unchallenged. Like Psalmanazar, he received a public grilling, in his case by members of the Royal Geographical Society. They were unimpressed by his inability to show them where he had been on any map, and by his sparse grasp of any of the native languages he had supposedly learned in the wild. In due course, an investigation by the
Daily Chronicle
revealed that de Rougemont’s real name was Henry Louis Grin, and that he had a wife and seven children in Australia. He had run away from his responsibilities after various harebrained inventions failed to sell, including an automated
potato digger that didn’t work, and a diving suit that drowned the first man who tried it. He had augmented his knowledge of northern Australia with research in the Reading Room at the British Library. Exposed by the press, de Rougemont (or Grin) turned it to his advantage, touring South Africa in 1899 as “The Greatest Liar on Earth,” though a similar tour to Australia didn’t go down at all well and he was booed offstage.

In 1906 he appeared in the huge aquarium at the London Hippodrome, where he successfully demonstrated his turtle-riding skills, but his last business venture (producing an apparently inedible substitute for meat) came to nothing during World War I.

After that, de Rougemont lived, according to his obituary in the
New York Times
, in “a simple style” in London as Louis Redmond until his death in a workhouse hospital in 1921.

Compared to Cagliostro, his career as an impostor was fleeting. The world had moved on since the days of Psalmanazar and Princess Caraboo. Rationality was the order of the day. Modern communications offered fewer places to hide, and science had learned much with the passing of the years. Though de Rougemont was a plausible liar and armed with in-depth research, he couldn’t resist pushing things too far. His claims of encountering flying wombats were never likely to survive expert scrutiny.

One who did survive expert scrutiny, unsuspected, and for an entire lifetime, was
James Barry
(1792–1865). Even without the concealment at its heart, Barry’s life would rank as extraordinary. Graduating as a doctor at thirteen, he joined the British Army
and was appointed assistant surgeon before his fifteenth birthday. His first posting was to Cape Town, where he became personal physician to the governor, Sir Charles Somerset. In 1826 he found fame as the first British doctor to perform a successful caesarean section. Slightly built and just above five feet tall, James Barry was also famous for his sharp tongue and quick temper, challenging several men to duels (though he never killed anyone). After tours of duty in Mauritius and Jamaica, he was posted to St. Helena as resident surgeon. Here his argumentative streak led to a court-martial for “conduct unbecoming,” and although he was exonerated, he was sent home to England. In 1851 he was appointed deputy inspector general of hospitals in Corfu, where his innovations in the hygiene and diet of patients set new standards that were to inspire Florence Nightingale. Barry was considered too senior to serve in the Crimea, but he nevertheless visited it and met the Lady with the Lamp, giving her the worst dressing down of her life. She was later to write: “I should say [he] was the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the army.” After many more medical reforms and other successes, Barry was retired (against his wishes), settling in Marylebone, London, where he died of diarrhea during an epidemic in 1865.

He had left strict instructions that his body was to be left in the clothes he died in and sewn up in a sheet before his burial. Although the senior doctor had already examined him and signed his death certificate, as his corpse was being laid out, a female attendant noticed something unusual. It was the body of a woman—and one that had, at some point, borne a child. The funeral at St. Paul’s went ahead regardless and Barry was buried (as a man) in Kensal Green cemetery, but the scandalous news
soon leaked out. Some said Barry was a hermaphrodite, others that she was a woman; many refused to believe any such thing. But as there was no postmortem, no definitive judgment could be made and the army decided to lock Barry’s records away for a century.

Thanks to some heroic research in the 1950s by the historian Isobel Rae, we now know that James Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley, the daughter of a Cork grocer. She had started dressing as a boy from the age of ten. Her mother, Mary-Ann, was the sister of a real James Barry, a professor of painting at the Royal Academy. The family fell on hard times after Margaret’s father was jailed for debt in 1803, so her mother and some influential friends of her uncle James conspired to smuggle her into medical school.

The disappearance of Margaret Bulkley and the appearance of James Barry were carefully orchestrated. Mrs. Bulkley and “James” traveled up to Edinburgh posing as aunt and nephew, and the new “James Barry” enrolled at the university. To protect the secret, they cut themselves off from friends and family. Only the conspirators knew who they were. From then on, Margaret always wore an overcoat and lied about her age to avoid questions about her smooth chin and high voice. Her graduation in 1812, though no one suspected it at the time, made her the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain.

As for the question of her baby, it seems likely that it was conceived as a result of her relationship with Lord Charles Somerset, governor of the Cape Colony. Their close friendship had given rise to rumors of a gay affair at the time, and Barry made an unexplained excursion to Mauritius for several months where it is possible she gave birth. No record of the fate of the
child has survived and her mother, of course, never even so much as hinted at its existence.

It’s barely credible that such a successful and public individual managed to conceal the secret of her sex for more than sixty years. The pressure to keep up appearances must have been extraordinary, and her aggressive demeanor part of that front. Once dismissed as a transvestite, or some sort of intersexual freak, neither description does justice to this astonishing person. Man enough to flirt with women, and feminine enough to give birth to her lover’s child, James Barry must rank as the most successful impostor of all time.

A single change of identity was enough to last Margaret Bulkley for a lifetime, but
Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln
(1879–1943) seems to have suffered from multiple personality disorder. He was variously an actor, arms dealer, post-office worker, oil speculator, British Liberal MP, vicar, and German spy. His spiritual loyalties were even looser than those of Titus Oates, veering from Judaism to Presbyterianism, working as an Anglican missionary, and finally ending up as a Buddhist monk. Like Oates, he combined a desperate desire for recognition with a breathtaking dishonesty. Unlike Oates, he was also highly intelligent and immensely likable.

Ignácz Trebitsch was born in the small town of Paks in central Hungary, one of at least fourteen children. The scant attention he received no doubt explains much of his future behavior. In 1895, his family moved to Budapest and the sixteen-year-old Trebitsch enrolled at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art. He lied to get in and dropped out after a year. Falsehood and
inability to stick to one course were to be the hallmarks of his career. At eighteen, pursued by the police for stealing a gold watch, Trebitsch fled abroad. He spent almost no time in his homeland again. As his biographer Bernard Wasserstein put it: “Travel for Trebitsch was not a source of amusement or of intellectual enrichment; it was a disease.”