QI The Book of the Dead

troubles began when he was sacked as a tutor to a rich family for refusing the sexual advances of the mistress of the house. His ‘prodigious’ gift for languages offered a way out and a chance to earn a living as someone else. Fastening on Formosa afforded him ‘a vast scope to a fertile fancy to work upon’. In another age, with his talent for fine-grained invention, he might have made a superb fantasy novelist.
    Unlike Oates and Cagliostro, Psalmanazar was, in the end, a truthful man. He underwent a religious experience after reading William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), an eighteenth-century self-help manual that also changed the life of his friend Dr Johnson. Law’s mystical work advised surrender to God on the grounds that God’s wisdom is beyond rational enquiry. This new philosophical outlook, coupled with a deep absorption in his scholarship, somehow released Psalmanazar, enabling him to come to terms with what he called the ‘vile and romantic account’ that had briefly made him famous. He reinvented himself as a pious and respected English man of letters, his last and happiest persona. But there is in the memoirs, written in his eighties, still a mischievous twinkle in his eye: ‘I never met with, nor heard of any one, that ever guessed right, or any thingnear it, with regard to my native country.’ His last secret – who he really was – he took with him to his grave.

     
    Almost half a century later, another example of self-appointed foreign royalty came to light in the West Country in the exotic persona of Princess Caraboo (1791–1864).
    In April 1817 a beautiful young woman in a turban knocked at the door of a cobbler in the village of Almondsbury in Gloucestershire, not far from Bristol. She spoke an unintelligible language, but gestured that she needed a place to sleep. Unsure what to do, the cobbler’s wife took her to Mr Hill, the overseer of the poor. He would normally have locked her up as a vagabond but instead chose to escort her to the manor house to seek advice from the local bigwig, Samuel Worrall, the county magistrate and town clerk of Bristol. Worrall’s manservant (who was Greek and spoke several European languages) could make no sense of her either, so it was arranged for her to spend the night at the village inn. There, she insisted on sleeping on the floor rather than a bed, and, on seeing a picture of a pineapple on the wall, said the word ‘ananas’. Offered a cup of tea, she covered her eyes and muttered what seemed to be a prayer before drinking it.
    The next day she was taken back to the manor house for a second interview. Samuel Worrall’s American wife Elizabeth took a liking to her, showing her some furniture decorated with Chinese scenes and coaxing her into revealing her name was ‘Caraboo’. But the Greek manservant was suspicious and Worrall himself – known as ‘Devil’ Worrall and a notorious drunkard – irritably intervened and declared she was a beggar and must be sent to Bristol to be tried for vagrancy. During her briefincarceration there, a Portuguese sailor was found who claimed to understand her language. He explained that she was from an island called Javasu. Her mother had been killed in a war against the Boogoos (who were cannibals), and she had been kidnapped by pirates (killing one of them in the process). She had escaped by leaping from the pirate ship as it passed through the Bristol Channel and swum ashore. What’s more, she was a princess.
    This rather altered things for ‘Devil’ Worrall. He had been trying to publicise his struggling private bank and was most accommodating when his wife insisted the ‘princess’ be brought back to Knole Park as an honoured guest. She stayed with them through the summer, delighting throngs of visitors. She showed off her fencing and archery skills, swam naked in the lake, performed a war dance involving a gong, prepared a spicy chicken curry and prayed to ‘Allah Tallah’ from the treetops. The Worralls’ Greek manservant brooded in the background. Once, he woke her in the middle of the night yelling ‘Fire!’ but the Princess showed no sign of alarm. A written sample of Princess Caraboo’s native language found its way to Oxford University where linguists gave their opinion that it was a fake, so Mr Worrall invited the learned Dr Wilkinson from Bath to settle the matter once and for all. Wilkinson, who lectured on everything from electricity to washable