In 1817 a barefoot woman knocked on an English door, spoke a language no scholar could place, and bewitched Bristol society for ten weeks before a neighbor recognized her.

She called herself Princess Caraboo of Javasu, fenced with a sword, climbed trees, prayed to Allah Tallah, and wrote in a script Oxford linguists pretended to decipher. She was Mary Baker, a cobbler's daughter from Devon who'd been a servant girl and made the whole island up. The gentry who'd paraded her in silk for ten weeks did not press charges; they bought her a ticket to Philadelphia and tried to forget. The Bristol Journal that June covered every twist of the unmasking, and somehow she comes off better than the marks.

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The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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