Page 79 - All About History - Issue 12-14

HISTORY’S 10 GREATEST IMPOSTORS

THE SERVANT GIRL WHO BECAME A PRINCESS

Mary Baker English, 1791-1864
Wearing exotic clothes and speaking a foreign She swam naked and was handy with a bow
language, a young woman was found wandering and arrow. She called pineapples “ananas” and said
the streets near Bristol in 1817 who said her name they were the fruit of her homeland. She drank tea,
was Princess Caraboo. The local authorities locked but only after praying with one hand over her eyes.
her up, believing she was a beggar. She didn’t want the comfort of a bed, preferring
While in prison, she claimed she had been the floor instead. Her portrait was painted and
captured by pirates but had somehow managed used in the Bristol Journal, which was her undoing;
to escape from their ship in the Bristol Channel she was spotted by a boarding-house keeper who
ē RATING ē
and swim to shore in the UK. She also declared recognised her as Mary Baker, a cobbler’s daughter Cunning:
that she was a princess and had come from the from Devon. Having found herself homeless and
island of Jevasu in the Indian Ocean. Given her fed up of being a servant girl, Audacity:
unconventional ways, she was widely believed and, she had invented her Media storm:
upon her release, her behaviour quickly secured her own language Success:
the status of a local celebrity. and story.

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE
EIFFEL TOWER – TWICE ē RATING ē

Cunning:
Victor Lustig Audacity:

Austro-Hungarian 1890-1947 Media storm:
Victor Lustig was a notorious con artist Success:
who managed to sell France’s most prized
possession: the gleaming Eiffel Tower at the
heart of Paris. This wasn’t enough for him
though and, displaying amazing audacity, he
tried to sell it a second time.
In 1925, Czechoslovakian-born Lustig
noticed that the Eiffel Tower, which
had been erected in 1889, was costing a
fortune for post-war France to maintain.
So he invited five scrap-metal dealers to
visit him and pretended to be the deputy
director-general of the Ministère de Postes
et Télégraphes. Offering to sell the Tower to
one of them and urging his assembled team
to keep quiet to avoid a public outcry, Lustig
pinned his hopes on one man in particular
– the upstart André Poisson who was
desperate for kudos in a city in which
he felt sidelined. Poisson handed over
a bag of cash and went to collect
his 7,000 tons of steel. But the
authorities said they knew
nothing about the deal and
Poisson was too embarrassed THE BUILDING OF THE EIFFEL TOWER
to inform the police about Named after its engineer Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel
the con. Tower was completed in Paris in 1889 as the grand
Buoyed by his success, entrance to the World’s Fair being held that year.
Lustig, who had taken a train The proposal to erect it wasn’t entirely popular –
architects and members of Paris’ arts circles objected
to Vienna, returned a few weeks on artistic grounds – but once it had been built, the
later to try the trick on another 300-metre (980-foot) tall iron-lattice structure (it
group of scrap dealers. This time, is now 324 metres (1,063 feet) tall, thanks to the
however, the victim went to addition of an antenna in 1957) won many of them
the police and Lustig only just over. Five years in the planning and designed by
managed to get away before he Stephen Sauvestre, it was the tallest man-made
structure in the world and remained so until 1930.
was arrested.

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