QI The Book of the Dead

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 fantastical 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 mid-flight 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-handed 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 learnt 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 hare-brained inventions failed to sell, including an automatedpotato 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 the First World War.
    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