She spoke a strange language that no one could understand, and weirder still, she kept carrying a rectangular box with her that nobody was allowed to touch or look inside. And because none of the locals were the past incarnations of Brad Pitt's character from Se7en, everyone stopped trying to learn who this woman is and just started taking wild guesses as to her identity. You heard the expression "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebra"? It's like Occam's Razor, only much more conducive to this next joke:
The people who came across the hollow ship heard hoof beats, but instead of zebras, they thought of a whole premise for a daytime soap opera, with one elder coming to this logical conclusion about the woman: "She is clearly a princess from a foreign country who married a man she didn't love, had an affair, and was sent out into the sea in this strange craft as punishment. That box she carries? It has her lover's head inside it. Duh."
New Line Cinema
And so, having totally cracked the case, the villagers decided to … pack up the redheaded maybe alien, maybe foreign princess onto the boat and pushed her out into the sea again. Hey, if that's the punishment some foreign government sentenced her to, who were they to argue with their decision? Not total weirdos? And just like that, the Utsuro-bune was gone. But its legend lived on.