George Psalmanazar and the Extreme Art of Imposture

“Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable.”

In 1703, London fell victim to one of history’s most astonishing hoaxes. A blonde-haired and blue-eyed Frenchman arrived in the city and quickly achieved fame as the first ever person from Formosa (now Taiwan) to reach Europe. It all began, he claimed, with Jesuits kidnapping him from his native isle. After a few adventures through Europe, he was rescued from the clutches of devious Catholics by a Scottish priest, who subsequently converted him to Anglicanism, christened him George Psalmanazar, and brought him to London.

Psalmanazar became a celebrity. He would attend dinner parties and “eat all sorts of unforbidden flesh raw,” which he said was Formosan custom. According to his 1704 book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, his people even ate human flesh, particularly that of criminals and enemies. The secondary trade of an executioner was as a butcher of human meat. Psalmanazar described a crucified 19-year-old virgin girl whose “tender, delicate and delicious flesh” made her executioner very rich. Indeed, by Psalmanazar’s account, executioners must have belonged to one of the most thriving professions when, every year, 18,000 boys under the age of nine were sacrificed to the gods.

One would think that any sensible person would find these claims highly suspect, yet many wanted to believe Psalmanazar’s story. It satisfied British prejudices: He was a hero from a faraway land who had resisted enemy Catholic forces and joined the Anglican church. As the great Victorian adventurer and memoirist Harry Flashman (who committed rather a few hoaxes himself) once observed, “In England, you can’t be hero and bad. There’s practically a law against it.” (Emphasis original)