His real name is unknown to this day, but the man calling himself George Psalmanazar created one of the most impressive and successful hoaxes in history. He arrived in London in 1704, billing himself as the “Native of Formosa.” Although he had never been near the island (present-day Taiwan, which at that time was largely unexplored), he told excited audiences that he was a member of a princely Formosan family who had made his way to Japan and then to the outside world. His book, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, presented elaborate details and drawings of Formosan clothing, culture, religion, and manners – all entirely fabricated. It even had a Formosan alphabet chart.
Psalmanazar became a European sensation. His book was a best-seller, and was translated into a number of languages. Scientific societies sat spellbound at his lectures. The Formosa he described was a strange and brutal society, where a man had only to declare his wife an adulteress in order to behead and eat her. Each year, he said, eighteen thousand boys under the age of nine were sacrificed to the Formosan god, and cannibalism was lustily practiced. The consumption of the blood of snakes, he said, allowed most Formosans to live well past one hundred years.
If anyone ever disputed Psalmanazar on his facts, he held firm to a strategy of stubbornness. “What ever I had once affirmed in conversation,” he later wrote, “tho’ to ever so few people, and tho’ ever so improbable, or even absurd, should never be amended or contradicted in the narrative. Thus having once, inadvertently in conversation, made the yearly number of sacrificed infants to amount to eighteen thousand, I could never be persuaded to lessen it, though I had been often made sensible of the impossibility of so small an island losing so many inhabitants every year, without becoming at length quite depopulated, supposing the inhabitants to have been so stupid as to comply.”
Psalmanazar’s ruse was so successful that the Bishop of London sent him to Oxford, where he was to study and lecture on Formosan history, and the Anglican Church commissioned him to translate the Old and New Testaments into his native language. Within a few years, though, the charade began to crumble and its perpetrator was increasingly burdened by guilt, as well as a wicked opium addiction. His tortured memoirs, published two years after his death in 1763, revealed the deception – but never his true identity.
Source:
Farquhar, Michael. “Super-Dupers.” A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds. Penguin, 2005. 5, 6. Print.
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