On the evening of April 3, 1817, a young woman came to the village of Ammondsbury in Gloucestershire, England, and knocked exhaustedly on the door of a priest. She didn't speak English, dressed in tattered exotic clothes, and looked asian- The priest didn't know what to do, so he took her to the house of his friend Waller, the local magistrate.
The Wallers left her at home for the night, and the next day they inquired about the mysterious exotic woman's origins. She replied with movements and gestures, saying that her name was Karabu, who was originally a princess of the East, and unfortunately abducted to pirates and sold to a captain. The ship sailed to Europe, mooring in England on the way, and she took the opportunity to escape and live in the countryside. Begging everywhere for a living. The Wallerhof woman decided to take her in and tried to ascertain her nationality
Her behavior was very strange, insisting on cooking her own food, rarely eating meat, drinking only tea and water, and refusing to go to bed at night, preferring to sleep on the floor. She put a few feathers in her hair, beat a tambourine as she walked in the garden, and more often jumped into the pool with her clothes, and was once found lying on a tree with a bow and arrow.
The news of the exotic girl coming from the Waller family did not go away. People who had traveled to the Far East came to see her and observe her strange behavior. No one understood her language, but most thought she must have come from the East Indies.
Karabu disappeared 10 weeks later, and soon it was discovered that she was making a big splash in the high society of Buzz City. Mrs. Waller traveled to The City of Buzz and brought her back to the village of Ammondsbury.
Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Waller received a letter from Mrs. Neil, who lived in Bristol, saying that she had seen news in the local newspaper about Karabu, who was probably her former tenant, Mary Baker. After being interrogated by Mrs. Waller, the girl finally confessed to lying and revealed her identity and interrogation.
Calab's personal experience is as surprising as her fabricated story. She was originally a poor child in Devonshire, her real name was Mary Wilcox, and when she was 8 years old, her family told her to go out to work,She was abused, ran away from home at the age of 16, wandered to London with a group of gypsies, so that she not only knew the strange habits of the gypsies, but also got the strange clothes from them.
Mary met a man named Beckstand in London (she referred to him simply as Beck), and after marrying him, this person traveled around the world, teaching Mary some Arabic and Malay language piecemeal, which was the basis of her strange language, and she was abandoned by Beckstandt only a few months after her marriage, and from then on she thought about it all the time and gradually dressed up as a foreign princess.
Mrs. Waller listened to her misfortune and expressed deep sympathy. Mary offered to go to the United States, and Mrs. Waller paid for her travels and took care of several missionaries who were in the same boat as her.
On the way, the boat passed by St. Helena's Island, and Mary once again disguised herself as a karabo, smuggled herself— a dinghy— to the island. Napoleon was exiled after the defeat at Waterloo, and it was on that island that she seemed to have attracted Napoleon as his companion.
A few years later, there were rumors that she had returned to London to sell leeches for a living, and nothing had been heard about this eccentric karabu ever since.