In 1840, rare book collectors across Europe received what at first glance was an entirely ordinary item: the catalog for an upcoming estate auction. On the block was the library of a recently deceased gentleman in Binche, France, one Count J. N. A. de Fortsas.
Count Fortsas, it turned out, was a very peculiar fellow. In his sixty-nine years he focused obsessively upon collecting an utterly unique library. He would only own books of which no other copy existed. If he discovered the existence of another copy of a book in his collection, he would burn his book, so that he might once again experience the thrill of buying the only copy in existence. Over the years, this practice had dreadfully decimated his library, so that upon his death he owned only fifty-two books. And yet each of these books was priceless, the only copy. Collectors had long given up many of them for extinct, and still others were alluring obscurities never heard of before. Virtually every major collector in Europe found at least one item in the slim catalog that seemed to be written especially for him—and though the collector may never have heard of the title before, now he simply had to have it.
When the auction day of August 10, 1840, arrived, the streets of the little town of Binche were invaded by scores of book collectors from across the Continent, all clutching marked-up copies of the Fortsas auction catalog, and all eyeing each other in the streets with barely disguised distrust. Inquiries to the thick-headed locals were useless: none of them knew where Count Fortsas lived. Enough collectors got over their mutual distaste for each other to congregate in the local tavern, where they plied the regulars for any information on Fortsas and his precious fifty-two-volume library. As these fruitless attempts were proceeding, a man ambled in and read an official announcement: effective immediately, the proud people of Binche were to retain their great local treasure by purchasing the entire lot directly from the Count’s family.
So sorry, he added, but the auction has been called off.
The tavern erupted in angry curses in French, Dutch, German, and English, all to the protestation of locals who insisted that they had never even heard of a Count Fortsas before. By the time the first collector had uttered the magic word—hoax—the man who had read the announcement was long gone.
It was decades before anyone discovered the handiwork of Renier Chalon, an antiquarian who had created the fake Fortsas catalog and gleefully salted it with nonexistent books so tantalizingly titled that he knew his greedy rivals would traverse a continent in pursuit of them. Chalon’s descriptions of imaginary books were conjured up with a truly devilish personal animus, written with the precise knowledge of his rivals’ obsessions so as to create the one perfect title that might drive a specific recipient in Amsterdam or London mad with acquisitiveness.
To achieve his illusion, all Chalon had to do was invent a deceased noble and some book titles. Tell people what they want to hear, Chalon had reasoned, and they will joyfully leap over their own ignorance and the most obvious improbabilities. But he was not the first to realize this. Over a century before, another had gone even further—inventing a language, a country, an entire living man.
* * *
IN 1704, A time when many strange people from strange lands were strolling the streets of England’s burgeoning capital, George Psalmanazar was the strangest of all. He was a Formosan, a native of the island we today call Taiwan, and the first of his kind to reach the shores of Great Britain. No one had ever seen a Formosan before; and he, presumably, had never seen an Englishman before.
Always accompanied by the Scottish chaplain Alexander Innes, who had discovered and converted the lost and wandering heathen to Christianity, Psalmanazar was famous from the moment he set foot on shore. Bishops and clergy clamored to meet this miraculous convert, a man who could speak volubly in both the cleric’s tongue of Latin and in his native Formosan. Nobles and wealthy merchants of London would invite him to dinner to listen to him speak Formosan; noblewomen watched in fascination as the wild heathen paused in his discourses to dine off a dinner plate heaped with raw meat and dirty roots.
He was, he would explain between bloody mouthfuls, a victim of a kidnapping. Jesuit priests setting up a mission on his island had singled him out for his amazing ability to learn languages and had spirited him away to a Jesuit retreat in Europe, where he was to be indoctrinated as a native missionary to Formosa—an agent of Christ who was both of their culture and yet able to perform a Latin mass. But I escaped, Psalmanazar would add. And Chaplain Innes, he recounted gratefully, had saved him when he was but a wanderer in a strange land, without a friend in the world.
His tale, of being the only man of his kind here, stranded half a world away from his home, was deeply affecting to Londoners. But there were a few problems with his tale. George Psalmanazar was not really named George Psalmanazar. He had never been kidnapped by Jesuits. He did not speak or write Formosan, or practice any Formosan religion. He had never been to Formosa; and was not, in fact, any sort of Formosan at all.
He wasn’t even Asian.
* * *
WE DO NOT know where he was born. In the memoirs that he kept hidden in his desk, Psalmanazar only says that he was not born in Europe but did grow up there. He does not say which country it was that he grew up in. From hints that he left in his memoir, and from the perfect French that he was always able to speak, some acquaintances ventured to guess that he may have been raised in southern France. But then, George was a man who could speak many languages perfectly. He could have been from almost anywhere.
Born in 1685, he grew up in a nondescript village with his mother—his estranged father, the descendant of an “ancient but decayed family,” had moved far away, to Germany, when the boy was but five years old. George was an only child of sorts. There had been other siblings, but they had not survived childhood. In those days, few people did.
His mother sent him to be educated by local Franciscan monks. They quickly noted the young boy’s facility with new languages; when visitors came to the school, the monks would trot little George out first, and have him recite Latin to the impressed onlookers. By the age of nine, he was fluent.
His later schooling came among Jesuits, and then he was sent away to attend college under the tutelage of the Dominican order. He was by far the youngest student there, perhaps only fourteen or fifteen years old. But for all his abilities, George was fairly lazy, and his professors little better. His philosophy tutor was simply incompetent; another professor entirely neglected the usual course of classical studies, instead rambling on about his favorite subject, military fortifications. He might arrive and intone to the class
—Today we will be building berms.
And George would find himself and his classmates building clay models of fortified breastworks in the middle of the lecture hall. Meanwhile, his rhetoric and theology texts gathered dust.
George tired of his afternoon classes. It was a long walk from his lodgings into the city, and the coursework looked pointless to him. He began to cut class, opting instead to take meandering hikes through the city and out into the countryside. There he would thoughtfully write letters home to his mother complaining about being broke and how terrible college was.
She had already strained her finances to the breaking point just to send him. Worse still, George had an utter inability to spend money wisely, and his clothes grew shabbier by the day. He took up a tutoring job with a well-to-do family to make up the shortfall, but his tatty clothes and irritating earnestness—he’d utter pious platitudes to them that he didn’t half believe himself, just hoping to impress them—soon lost him the job. He was broke enough that he had to go home, but too poor to pay for the journey.
George watched the pilgrims and travelers on the streets of his town, pondering glumly how he could ever see his mother again. And then it came to him: the key to being treated differently was to become someone else.
* * *
POOR IRISH PILGRIMS were well received in town when they begged for money. The best way to get home, then, was to become an Irishman. He forged a paper to prove his Irish nationality, and then hit upon a clever way to cover his utter inability at English or Gaelic: he wouldn’t speak it. Instead, he would only speak in his beloved Latin, the universal language of all educated pilgrims.
He slowly made his way home. Begging in Latin wasn’t exactly a bum’s paradise; he later recalled that he was limited to “accosting only clergymen or persons of figure, by whom I could be understood.” And as always, the moment a kindly priest gave him a few coins, it was spent. By the time he reached home, his clothes were in tatters; his mother’s neighbors were scandalized.
His mother upbraided him for his appearance, and he half expected a scolding for his imitation of an Irishman. But he was wrong. His mother was now so impoverished herself that she took him aside one day and calmly suggested that perhaps he should go visit his father, and that maybe he should keep up his Irish act in order to get there. She outfitted her young impostor as best she could, fitting him with a staff, a cloak, and a long black buckram gown. Scraping up her last few gold coins, she sewed them into his clothing.
He retraced his route back to his college, and from there faced hundreds and hundreds of miles on the open road between there and Cologne. And that roadside was littered with bodies—puffed, bloated bodies, with blackened tongues half pecked out by birds: “Now and then at some lonely place lay the carcase of a man rotting and stinking on the ground by the way-side, with a rope about his neck, which was fastened to a post two or three yards distant.” These were highwaymen, who were usually discharged soldiers and sailors desperate for money. They had been killed and left to rot by villagers as a warning to other thieves.
There were warnings for the likes of George, too—little crosses by the side of road, built of stone and wood, memorials to unwary travelers, young and alone, who had been robbed and murdered on that very spot. George would stop to ponder them, and then wonder what lay ahead for his own lonesome journey.
He was not yet sixteen years old.
* * *
EVENTUALLY GEORGE REACHED the great gates of the city of Lyon, where a guard asked if he wanted alms. Yes, I do, George replied quite innocently.
The guardsman led George through the streets of the city for well over an hour; the boy could scarcely keep up, as he was looking agog at the great squares and grand buildings and cathedrals of the big city. When they reached another gate at the opposite end of the city, the guard stopped and reached into his pocket.
—Here, he said, clapping a couple of copper coins into George’s hand. You are to pass through that gate. If you ever come back into the city of Lyon, you will be whipped.
He walked away, leaving the boy speechless.
* * *
AFTER A JOURNEY of five hundred miles on foot, George found his father in Germany, still living in the town where he’d been told to look. But nothing prepared him for his father’s house: it was bare, even poorer than his mother’s. After a long and dangerous journey to meet a man he barely knew, he felt it had all been a waste. Sighing over “the forlorn condition I saw myself in, the mean figure I made in an obscure village,” George longed now simply to go back home to his mother. His father, by contrast, was delighted to have his long-lost son back in his home again. He hadn’t seen his child in over ten years, and here he was again, now a strapping young man.
—You should look in town, see if they’ll hire you as a tutor, he’d urge. Then you could stay here.
George reluctantly went into town looking for a school or rich family to hire him. But there was a university there, and the streets were already filled with poor students—so many, in fact, that they would go house to house as holy buskers, singing pious Latin verses for handouts. George knew Latin better than anyone, but when he attempted it, got only stares; Germans had their own way of pronouncing Latin, and George’s accent simply baffled them.
His father was some comfort, for he talked incessantly of his happy younger days traveling in Holland, and young George began to imagine his own trip someday. Poor as he was, his father was a worldly man—he could readily speak Italian, Spanish, German, and French. George listened and learned, and spent his alone hours pacing about his father’s house, wondering what to do next.
His Irish disguise hadn’t worked well because there were so few people he could beg from, and discovery could come at the hands of the first priest who happened to be Irish. The way around this problem, George figured, was to become a nationality that everyone had heard of but no one knew anything about.
* * *
A CONVINCING FOREIGNER needs a language and a passport, and George set about procuring both. The passport was the easiest, though it was also the most badly botched. Like any self-respecting sixteen-year-old dropout, George had already forged an ID or two—his passport, after all, currently listed him as an Irishman. He forged traveling papers for a Japanese national as well as he could, though his handwriting was so sloppy that it took many attempts to get even a mildly believable document together. It still needed an official wax seal; for this, George simply melted the one off his old fake passport and melted it back onto the new one.
Forging a language was another matter altogether. The easternmost language that George knew anything about was Hebrew, in which sentences run from right to left on the page. Sensibly enough, he decided the Japanese alphabet would too. He’d heard that they had a different alphabet in the Far East, so he created a distinct set of Japanese alphabet characters, training himself to write and “read” them backward. Eventually he was able to do it with nearly the same ease as he had with any genuine language. As a finishing touch, he invented a Japanese calendar. Each year now had twenty months.
It was not easy accomplishing this in his father’s house: “The truth is,” he later admitted, “time was short and knowledge in what I went about so very small and confused, and what I did was by stealth, and fear of being detected by my father.” But once he felt ready to assume his new identity, he approached his father and announced that he was departing to the Low Countries.
His father began to weep. How could George leave him now—his own grown son, whom he had not seen since he was but a child of five years? But the boy prevailed upon his father; was it not he, after all, who had been regaling George with tales of youthful adventures in the Netherlands? Reluctantly, his father agreed. He outlined a safe route to the Dutch, and tearfully bid his son farewell. As he left, George mailed off a letter to his mother, explaining that he was traveling to the Low Countries for a brief spell, but would be back home again soon. And then he walked away, leaving his father’s cottage behind him, until it diminished into a speck far behind him, and then disappeared altogether.
George’s parents never heard from him again.
* * *
OUT ON THE road, begging in fluent Latin and occasionally pausing to jabber excitedly in “Japanese,” at first George found somewhat more success than he had as an Irishman. It mattered little that he didn’t look the least bit Asian; later acquaintances ventured that George, with his pasty complexion and light blond hair, resembled a Dutchman. But in the 1690s almost nobody in Europe, least of all George himself, knew what an actual Asian looked like. The blond boy could be utterly fearless in his pose as an Asian because, for all he knew, he really did look like one.
In fact, when he reached the garrisoned town of Landau, his Japanese act was a hit with the foot soldiers there. George was in mid-routine when several musketeers grabbed him and dragged him off. The boy was brought before the town’s commanding officer, who demanded an explanation of his presence. George babbled some “Japanese” and flailed about through his alibis until the officer simply ordered him to be tossed in jail as a spy. He was released the following day, led to the city gates, and told never to come back.
His long travels and habitual inclination to shabbiness proved a poor combination. “I saw myself in a short time covered with rags and vermine,” he lamented, “and infected with a virulent itch.” His hands became disgustingly pustulent, and his mean appearance did not inspire much charity among fellow pilgrims.
Dragging himself into Liège, George found shelter with a group of fellow vagrants in a local hospital, where men passed the day by swapping stories, booze, tubercular coughs, and lice. Word came that the Dutch army was hiring “such vagrants as appeared fit to carry a musket.” George persuaded six “fellow ragamuffins” to join him in a trip down to the recruiter. The recruiter sent off all six of George’s companions to their fate in the army, but George was different; he wanted George as his personal servant.
But first, George had to be made presentable, and that meant getting him new clothes and curing his rash. His rash now covered most of his body, and had left him covered in scabs. And so ointments were rubbed in, special baths given, leeches applied. Nothing worked. His body was as repellent as ever.
His new mentor simply gave up on trying to cure the condition, and had George accompany him back to the city of Aix-la-Chapelle. There, it turned out, the recruiter owned a coffeehouse and billiards hall, and George was pressed into service as a waiter. In his off hours, he was to tutor his employer’s son in Latin. But his new master clearly hoped that the presence of a Japanese freak might attract extra business to the coffeehouse. Unfortunately, the townspeople were too occupied with seeking out the newly fashionable springs where they could take mineral-water cures.
The coffeehouse had employees working in another sideline, a refreshment catering business for large balls and banquets. George was never sent out, on account of the rather offputting scabs that covered his inflamed hands, until one day when there was no one else available. Doling out punch to wealthy guests, George stared agog at the grandeur of the party before him. It was a world he’d scarcely known before.
His job eventually came to an unexpected end. George was sent by his employer’s wife on a journey of many miles on foot to deliver a message to her husband, who had gone off to attend to some business. The boy was in an unfamiliar province, and the map his father had given him was no good now. He wandered back and forth to different crossroads, trying to remember where it was that he’d come from and where he was supposed to be going. But he was hopelessly lost, and mortified to think that even if he did find his master, he’d be terribly late with the message. And so, inquiring for the way to Cologne, he set off on his own once again.
* * *
AS HE TROD wearily into Cologne, George told himself that at least from here he could find his way back to his father’s and then his mother’s home again. But once in town, he again fell upon that last resort of the desperate traveler—the army recruitment officer. The regiment he joined was a ragged unit of deserters from the French army, university dropouts, and bewildered German farmboys. Most spent their off hours drunk or whoring, though George was little inclined to follow. But playing the unconverted heathen, he delighted in twisting the few pious soldiers into logical knots as they tried to explain and defend the bizarre precepts of Christian religion.
One such fellow, hoping to convert his Japanese comrade, talked him into visiting a monk:
When we got to the monastery, we found the good old capuchin sitting on a bench … with a lusty young woman kneeling before him, barking like a dog, and making a great many other antick noises and postures; upon which I was told that she was possessed, and that the good father was exorcising an evil spirit out of her.
George did not convert that day.
* * *
HIS REGIMENT STAGGERED into the winter underfed, underclothed, and with scarcely a freezing pallet to sleep on. George could barely keep up, and finally the captain of the regiment recommended him for discharge. But once he got his papers, he also got a nasty shock: they wanted his uniform back.
George stripped down and shivered—at which point he discovered that the captain had sold off the civilian clothes that he was to have held for discharge. George was turned out into the cold with nothing but a blue linen frock to wear, the bare soles of his feet numb against the frozen soil. Though he would have scarcely believed it as he walked away from the garrison, half naked in the freezing air, his discharge was lucky. Many of his comrades died of exposure and disease later that winter.
Begging for clothes and food, George made his way back to Cologne again, where another officer took pity on the forlorn boy.
—What is your name? he asked the ragged pilgrim.
George thought carefully.
—Psalmanazar, he finally answered.
* * *
THE OFFICER PERSONALLY recruited him into his regiment, and that spring they were deployed in Holland. With his new name, Psalmanazar took on a whole new vitality in creating himself anew as a Japanese. His favorite ploy was showing up at the regimental Sunday services to distract the Christians:
I would turn my back to them, and turning my face to the rising or setting sun, to make some awkward shew of worship, or praying to it … I made me a little book with figures of the sun, moon and stars, and other such imagery as my phrensy suggested to me, and filled the rest with a kind of gibberish prose and verse, and which I muttered or chanted as often as the humour took me.
His strange antics caught the attention of the regimental commander, Brigadier George Lauder, who invited him to dine with him one evening late in February 1703—an unheard-of honor for a foot soldier. George arrived to find several other officers and regimental officials with Lauder, including the chaplain, a Scotsman named Alexander Innes. As George dined hungrily on officers’ fare, and suffered the droning speeches of the regiment’s staff, he felt Innes, who was quieter and a little more friendly than the rest, observing him across the table.
After the meal, Innes walked over and kindly accosted him.
—We must speak in private. Will you visit my house?
* * *
AT INNES’S HOUSE, the two passed many hours in conversation; George could not yet speak English, but both were fluent in Latin. There were more visits; scarcely a one would pass without Innes thanking him and slipping a few coins into the youth’s palm at the end. But when talk turned to George’s other new friends—other ministers who wished, perhaps, to convert him—Innes would stop him.
—You needn’t bother with them. They do not understand you as I do.
One day, when George was visiting, the two fell to discussing the Japanese language. Innes pulled down a volume of Cicero, opened it, and pointed out a passage of De Natura Deorum to the young man.
I want you, he said, to translate this into Japanese.
George froze. And then, without betraying his fear, he picked up a quill and began to write, moving his hand from right to left on the parchment. Innes watched him write, knowing—as George did not—that to achieve the conversion of an exotic Japanese like George would surely mean a promotion to a cushier post.
George finished writing, and Innes took the paper away.
—Here, he said, passing him another sheet. Do it again.
George sat miserably, staring at the lines of Cicero. He had just made up line after line of nonsensical shapes on a page—and now he had to repeat it? He wrote out the translation as best as he could remember it.
Innes took the second sheet and compared it to the first.
—Look, he showed them to George. Half the characters are different.
George grasped for an explanation, but Innes didn’t need one.
—You need to be more careful from now on, he said.
George looked at his new mentor, shocked as the realization sank in.
They understood each other perfectly now.
* * *
IN MARCH 1703 the letter came from Henry Compton, the bishop of London, and Innes was overjoyed. They were to leave the regiment at the end of the year and proceed to England, where Bishop Compton would be waiting for them. But first a crucial matter had to be resolved: Psalmanazar was still an unconverted heathen. Innes took him to Brigadier Lauder’s house for one last time, and in the presence of the commander the Formosan heathen was baptized a Christian. Lauder gratefully presented him with a gilt pistol and a glowing letter of commendation—everything Psalmanazar needed to travel to England in safety.
Innes gathered together a suit of cast-off clothing for George to wear for his voyage. It was much too big for George; he felt a bit ridiculous as his sleeves and pants flapped about in the wind. And yet the young savage was feeling rather pleased with himself as he and Chaplain Innes prepared to set off. The chaplain, too, was feeling quite clever. He had talked George into altering his story a little—he was now a native of Formosa, not Japan, as Formosa was a land about which Europeans knew nothing except its name. If asked about his old story, George was simply to say, yes, I am also Japanese, as Formosa is a possession of Japan.
Now that Innes had converted the famous Formosan, his promotion in the church was assured. The only question was how to rid himself of his convert when he was no longer of use.
—When we are in London, he said to George, I will recommend that you be sent to Oxford. They will be most interested in learning the language of the Formosans.
* * *
HERE IS THE sight that greeted George one wintry day, as he and Innes entered London: severed heads. Bristling from the first arch of London Bridge were frozen, disembodied heads staked through with spiked poles, gazing without sight as ships passed by on the River Thames and carriages entered the city across the bridge below. They were the heads of miscreants and frauds, left out to rot until three full tides had passed.
George and Innes had already barely survived the crossing from Holland: a sudden storm had risen up and threatened to wreck the ship. But now, alive and in sight of their goal, they had more worries.
—You must prepare, Innes would hiss. Your language—you must prepare it.
Still, they could not have arrived at a better time. London—filthy, fetid, royal, teeming with money and vermin—had just surpassed Paris to become the largest city in Europe. It was the pool to which the swirling dregs of an empire drained, and its inhabitants held a conquering nation’s moneyed fascination with the curious, the bizarre, the passing strange. Walking past Painter’s Coffee Shop, George could peer at a giant eel on display; the proprietor offered a money-back guarantee if a patron could “say that he has seen a greater.” George was an altogether better catch: a natural curiosity that could speak, and write, in impeccable Latin.
* * *
PSALMANAZAR WAS BROUGHT forward to greet the bishop and presented him with a sheet of paper. It was the Lord’s Prayer written in Latin, and then rendered again in George’s native Formosan. Scholars puzzled over the document, and agreed—the savage’s words made no sense, but the grammar was so regular, so logical, that it must be a real language. The Formosan, it seemed, was every bit as real as Innes’s letter had promised. Soon every noble’s door in the city was opened to the chaplain and his noble savage.
Psalmanazar liked to shock his hosts.
—In my land, men are permitted to kill and eat their wives.
Forks dropped onto plates.
“But only if they suspect adultery,” he added.
When asked if he thought this barbaric, George would demur. Perhaps eating people is an uncivilized custom, he would admit, but it is not expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments.
While George entertained London’s upper crust, elsewhere in the city lay one of the only men who could prove him a fraud: Father Fountenay, a Jesuit missionary returned from China. Inevitably, the two had to meet; Hans Sloane, the brilliant polymath of the Royal Society, had invited them both to a Society meeting on February 2, 1704. The evening began with the usual matters natural and unnatural, and the examination of some ovarian cysts and a possum penis topped the list. Then, the secretary noted, “A letter was read from Mr. Collins concerning a person who pretended to life without food.”
Meanwhile, Psalmanazar cheerfully spoke gibberish to the assembled astronomers and botanists as Father Fountaney glared at him.
“You are a fraud,” Fountenay began, “for this simple reason: you say that Formosa is a province of Japan. It is not. It is a province of China.”
“You are wrong,” Psalmanazar replied flatly.
Fountenay sputtered on, but he faced an insurmountable problem: nobody else had been to Formosa. Every detail he gave, Psalmanazar calmly contradicted. And then the impostor delivered a coup de grâce: it was the Jesuits who kidnapped me from my native land. What would you expect from them except an attempt to discredit me?
Fountenay left in defeat; Psalmanazar was asked back the next week to dine with Sir Hans Sloane and other worthies of the Royal Society. Worse still, when the French priest was asked to venture what land Psalmanazar—who was probably from France himself—came from, Fountenay couldn’t even guess. He’d never heard such an accent or language in his life.
* * *
BUT NOT EVERY Society member was convinced. Later that evening in a tavern, one member approached Psalmanazar and asked him: How long does twilight last in Formosa this time of year? George gave the question little thought. But his questioner had given it a great deal of thought indeed, because with this simple question of astronomy he could detect the fraud. George would hardly have even known who his questioner had been: Sir Edmund Halley, the astronomer.
Halley and a few other members of the Society began to put it about town that perhaps Psalmanazar was not all that he appeared to be. But George now had powerful defenders like the Bishop of London and some of the members of the Royal Society. And Psalmanazar’s most powerful defender, bar none, remained … George Psalmanazar.
“We have an annual sacrifice of children on the island,” he told one assemblage. “Eighteen thousand eight-year-old boys are sacrificed at the altar.”
The group gasped, appalled.
“But surely,” someone would point out, “Formosa’s population cannot support such an annual massacre?”
George shrugged.
“Our god demands it.”
On no point could he be made to retract or alter his claims. Ever. It was, he later revealed, a deliberate strategy:
There was one maxim I could never be prevailed upon to depart from, viz. that whatever I had once affirmed in conversation, 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.
George’s many friends and defenders, irate at the whispers of fraud, published ads daring anyone to prove such an assertion—even offering cash if they could do it. No one appears to have taken them up on the offer. But perhaps it was only a matter of time.
Two months had already passed since George and Innes had arrived. Innes, sensing that a counterattack was needed, had already goaded George into producing yet another document in Formosan—a rendering of the catechism. But now the bishop and his other allies wanted more, Chaplain Innes told George. They wanted the entire history of the island.
George didn’t know the faintest thing about Formosa.
“You have two months,” Innes said.
* * *
STRANGE TO REFLECT, but it was easier three hundred years ago to get a book published quickly than it is today; Psalmanazar’s book was finished in March and in London bookstalls by mid-April. Scarcely three months had passed since Innes had suggested the project.
Psalmanazar may have been an indifferent student and an unprincipled fraud, but he was also a maniacally driven writer. In February and March of 1704, in the moments he could squeeze away from the tables of local nobles and clergy, he worked frantically on his manuscript. At his side sat a copy of Varneius’s 1646 history Descriptio Regni Japoniae et Siam, from which he freely stole, and which, just to be contrary, he pointedly contradicted. As fast as Psalmanazar could produce the pages, his Latin manuscript was “Englished” by Oswald, his translator. In the space of two months, Psalmanazar produced a 288-page book and sketched out dozens of plates and illustrations. The result, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, might have the most insolently ironic opening sentence in English literature: “The Europeans have such obscure and various Notions of Japan, and especially of our Island Formosa, that they can believe nothing for Truth that has been said of it.”
Psalmanazar did more than create a dreary recounting of royal lineages and politicians; he conjured an entire world. Writing over a century later, the antiquarian Isaac D’israeli was still so flabbergasted by the book’s audacity that he was reduced to sputtering:
If the reader is curious to examine this extraordinary imposture, I refer him to that literary curiosity, “An historical and geographical Description of Formosa … by George Psalmanazar, a Native of the said Isle,” 1704; with numerous plates, wretched inventions! of their dress! religious ceremonies! their tabernacle and altars to the sun, the moon, and the ten stars! their architecture! the viceroy’s castle! a temple! a city house! a countryman’s house! and the Formosan alphabet!
Not content with that, Psalmanazar also included interlinear translations from Formosan to English of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, buttressed by fold-out plates of the Formosan language and a chart of the Formosan numerical system. These he followed with botany, zoology, gastronomy—both plants and human body parts were eaten raw—and an account of the island’s history replete with conquests, emperors, and daggered intrigue. He even reproduced a letter from the King of Japan to the King of Formosa, though where exactly George could have got such a document nobody seems to have thought to ask. But such errors are easy to find. Psalmanazar had also included a detailed accounting of the island’s mineral resources, which apparently included two brass mines—a sight that any metallurgist would certainly be most interested in seeing.
* * *
THE MOST SENSATIONAL part of the book related to the island’s religious practices. Psalmanazar conjured up two founding fathers of the Formosan religion, the philosophers Zeroaboabel and Chorhe Mathcin:
They Demonstrated, by many Arguments, that there is one Supreme God, who is above all the visible things in the World.… But if they would Worship him according to his mind, in an acceptable manner, they should Build him a Temple, and in that they should make a Tabernacle, and an Altar, and upon the Altar they should Burn 20000 Hearts of young Children, under 9 Years of Age.
Not surprisingly, the Formosans drove out the two bloodthirsty prophets, at which point a pestilence descended upon the land; it was alleviated only when, in a slight concession to parental anger, God reduced His divine quota a little and let girls off the hook:
Ye shall begin the Year from this day, which is the first day of the Month Dig, and the first of the Festival of 10 days, and at this Festival ye shall Sacrifice to me every Year the hearts of 18000 young boys, under the age of 9 Years.… every month ye shall Sacrifice in all your Temples 1000 Beasts, viz. 300 Bulls, 400 Sheep or Rams, and the rest in Calves or Lambs.
This annual loss of children, Psalmanazar claimed, was more than made up for by the institution of polygamy on the island. And even with the occasional mass roasting of children’s hearts, George was quick to assure his readers that Formosa remained “one of the most Pleasant and Excellent of all the Asiatick Isles.”
Some critics, however, were unimpressed. It wasn’t Psalmanazar’s bizarre description of Formosa that caused problems. It was that he had tacked a rather conventional theological treatise onto the second half of the book. Critics were suspicious of how a recent immigrant from Formosa could knock out an abstruse hundred-page essay on Christianity—and at only nineteen years old. Worried by these complaints, Chaplain Innes began to quietly bump up George’s age in conversations. Psalmanazar was, he now claimed, actually twenty-two years old.
But the objections of critics hardly mattered, at least at first. London booksellers, clamoring for months for Psalmanazar’s book, could barely keep copies in stock; Innes pressed him to write an expanded second edition, even as the first was being translated and rushed into print in French, German, and Dutch editions. And soon Psalmanazar received word that Bishop Compton, his new mentor, had arranged for him to spend a semester attending his old alma mater—Christ Church College, at Oxford University.
* * *
WHEN YOU WALK into Christ Church, you have arrived.
In the early morning, there is a mist on the quad, through which you can see the carved statue of Mercury; beyond that, there is the towering spire of the cathedral, and the looming stone and wood of the quiet dormitories. Then there is the great Meadow, on which scarcely a moving form can be seen at such an early hour.
It is the focal point of an empire: that space in which the most promising minds are concentrated for a brief moment in their lives, before being refracted outward across the spectrum of British society. Sir Christopher Wren built the college cathedral not long before Psalmanazar’s arrival, and John Locke had prayed in it as a student; over a century hence, Lewis Carroll would be crossing the college quad with his math students. This, the most imposing college of the empire’s greatest university, was where Bishop Compton had sent George Psalmanazar, alleged Formosan and actual theology dropout.
Psalmanazar settled into his college room, and lay in his new bed and looked about in contentment—after years of military barracks and borrowed beds, his new home looked enormous to him. Like many of his fellow students, he was enjoying the first apartment of his own that he had ever had.
Although there had been some notion of his tutoring Oxonians in the Formosan tongue, George assiduously avoided any would-be linguists on campus. Instead, he spent his days sitting in on classes on logic, poetry, divinity, and Newtonian philosophy—what today we would call physics. He loved divinity class, where he could soak in his beloved theological arguments and occasionally bask in attention when the instructor asked him questions about the Formosan religion. But he was bored out of his mind by math class, and “history, especially ancient chronology &c., appeared so dark, intricate and liable to such insurmountable difficulties, that I never expected to meet any satisfaction in them.” George’s dismay is understandable. After all, he had just written a spurious best-selling history himself.
His attendance in all his classes was rather poor. Instead, he spent his days hiking around campus, usually with a pronounced limp. He was faking an attack of gout, because “my pretended lameness gave me a kind of gravity, which I was not willing to part with.” Concerned patrons sent him to a spa for a cure. Not surprisingly, when he returned to campus his limp was as bad as ever.
George was truly at his happiest in the cathedral, singing with the college’s choir. The choir, he later recalled, “was the main thing that captivated my vain, roving fancy, and took up most of my spare hours.” He may not have been the finest singer in the choir, but he was probably the most sober. He was appalled that many of his classmates attending choir stumbled in smashed from pre-rehearsal pub warmups at the Turf or the Bear, ready to slur and belch their way through “Ave Maria.”
In the evening, after a long day of skipping classes, limping around the quad, and singing pleasant hymns, George was faced by a dilemma: how could he work on the second edition of his book, goof off, and still look like a good student? After his years in the army, he hardly needed to use a bed to catch up on his sleep, and so he soon hit on an admirable solution:
I used to light a candle, and let it burn the greatest part of the night, to make my neighbors believe I was plying of my books; and sleeping in my easy chair, left the bed often for a whole week, as I found it to the further surprize of my bed-maker, who could hardly imagine how I could live with so little sleep.
All in all, it was splendid semester—although he didn’t learn very much. At the end of it he had finished a second edition of Description of Formosa, with even more outlandish plates than before, gorier details on sacrifice and cannibalism, and thundering denunciations of the critics who had dared to doubt the truthfulness of his first edition. He returned from Oxford to London, manuscript in hand, and disembarked from his carriage at Pall Mall, where he and his mentor Innes had taken lodging.
He’s not here anymore, he was told. Innes was now chaplain-general to the English forces in Portugal.
Standing in a London street, Psalmanazar was for a moment the man he had claimed to be all along: a stranger in a strange land, without a true friend in the world.
* * *
FOR A WHILE, the absence of his stage manager scarcely affected George. The second edition of Description of Formosa was a hit once again, and he continued his ruse by publishing a 1707 theological tract titled A Dialogue Between a Japanese and Formosan. He wasted months on end lolling about with London bohemians and noble patrons, indulging their endless appetite for novelty and details of quaint savage customs. Women, too, seemed strangely drawn to the celebrity cannibal, though George was privately so mortified with shyness that he rarely took advantage of adulterous advances made to him. “Hardly any man,” he admitted later, “who might have enjoyed so great a variety, ever indulged himself in so few instances of the unlawful kind as I have done.”
But eventually Londoners tired of their freak, and those who had never believed him much to begin with grew bolder in their attacks. By 1710, skeptical voices were becoming so loud that George’s benefactors felt obliged to publish a defensive tract, An Enquiry Into the Objections Against George Psalmanazar of Formosa. But it was too late, as any reader of the Spectator could see when it ran a spoof announcement in its May 16, 1711, issue:
On the 1st of April in the theatre on the Haymarket an opera will be performed with the title “The Cruelty of Atreus.” N.B. The scene in which Thyestes eats his own children will be played by the famous Mr. Psalmanazar, recently arrived from Formosa; the whole meal will be accompanied by kettle-drums.
Psalmanazar was becoming a joke.
* * *
PSALMANAZAR HAD SPENT most of his life—and all his adulthood—in deep disguise, and could hardly go back to the child he had once been. There was nothing left for him, it seemed, but life as a citizen of country and culture that existed nowhere but in his own mind.
Years of dallying about London had left him completely broke, and by 1712 he had been unemployed for so long that his job prospects were grim indeed. But then, one day, an inventor named Pattenden came calling. He’d developed a new white liquid japan—a variety of lacquer that was all the rage among Orient-bedazzled artisans in London. Pattenden had tried selling it, but was meeting with little success. And then he thought, why not hire a Japanese to tout liquid japan? “His proposal,” Psalmanazar admitted, “was that I should father and introduce it, under the notion of my having learned and brought the art from Formosa; in which condition, and my putting now and then a hand to painting, he offered me a considerable share in the profit.”
George Psalmanazar, washed-up celebrity, had found his first product endorsement. The pair hawked Psalmanazar’s White Formosan Work shamelessly, plugging it to anyone who would listen.
—As a japan it is exceedingly white!
—Marvelously hard-drying, gentle friends!
—And unaccountably smooth!
In truth, it wasn’t a bad lacquer. But Pattenden became enthralled by his own hyperbole. Whenever he saw a potential sale, he would praise the product outrageously, and then demand so much money for a jar of it that he drove all the customers away. It didn’t take long for the whole venture to go bust.
George was left in a deep depression, and with a nagging feeling that dishonest business was something that he could not stomach anymore.
* * *
HE TRIED TO go straight; although still halfheartedly maintaining his Formosan habits and accent, he sought out work as a tutor. The problem was, his education had been so lackadaisical that his attempts to teach “empyrical physic” and modern languages met with only the barest success. Fortunately, a London lawyer took notice of him and hired him as a full-time personal tutor to his children. The eldest son, though, was hopeless at Latin, and George cast about in vain for a topic that he knew anything about that the boy might show some ability at. He became desperate.
Today we will build a berm.
And so the Latin and rhetoric texts were set aside for George’s half-remembered teenage classes in military fortifications.
Eventually the job came to an end. The lawyer wasn’t very good about paying his tutor fees, and George already had old debts hanging over him. He drifted back into an army regiment in 1715, and followed it around the country. He still cut an unusual figure in the regiment. As noble a savage as ever, he was nicknamed Sir George, and the more gullible soldiers in the outfit actually came to believe that he really had been knighted.
His discharge in 1717 left him in Bristol, out of work once again. He longed for an honest living, and recalled how well his instinctive abilities at illustration had served him before—in lavishly illustrating his Description of Formosa, even in outlandishly embellishing the Japanese “hymnal” he kept as a teenager. Perhaps, he thought, he could turn an honest living at painting decorative fans. His friends encouraged his work, and soon he set himself to it. But like many an artist, he found he could not live by his brush. “I lived with a good family almost gratis,” he sighed, “and was early and late to work, yet I found it almost impossible to get a bare competency at it.”
A kindly local man of the cloth, who had heard of George’s tales but not of his critics in London, earnestly took up a collection in his parish to support the stranded Formosan. The money was good, twenty pounds per year, but George felt sickened when he accepted it. His fellow parishioners were giving money for a man they believed to be a needy Christian convert from savagery, not for the fraud that he knew himself to be. And so George Psalmanazar, a man who could invent entire languages from thin air, pocketed the money and set about polishing his Latin and other languages. Perhaps at the end of it all he could make an honest living as a translator of actual languages.
* * *
YEARS PASSED, AND Psalmanazar moved to London, where he gained more and more work from printers as a translator. By the 1720s he’d slowly allowed the charity payments to lapse. He never turned down the payments, but when contributors died off, he didn’t bother to seek replacements. Eventually he found himself earning his own way through the world. Friends, though, still delighted in knowing a real Formosan, and they continued to pester him for stories about his homeland. It made George heartsick—he could never admit the ruse to them, and so he dejectedly muttered Formosan sentences to hosts when asked, but he would just as soon that everyone forgot about it. He felt irredeemable, doomed.
And for a while, he very nearly was doomed. In 1728 he became deathly ill, and was sent to a friend’s country home to rest. He was already over forty now, and as he lay in his deathbed he saw his life as an awful waste. He was, for perhaps the first time in his life, ready to be converted; and one day during his infirmity, it finally happened. The instrument of conversion was a volume titled Serious Call to Devotion, just published by John Law. Its words struck at Psalmanazar’s heart:
What numbers of souls there are now in the world, in my condition at this very time, surprised with a summons to the other world; all seized at an hour when they thought nothing of it; frightened at the approach of death, confounded at the vanity of their labours, astonished at the folly of their past lives.…
God Almighty knows greater sinners, it may be, than you are, because He sees and knows the circumstances of all men’s sins, but your own heart, if it is faithful to you, can discover no guilt as great as your own; because it can only see in you those circumstances, on which the great part of guilt is founded.
Psalmanazar, unutterably weary from illness and a lifetime of secret guilt, took in each word as if it had been directed at him personally. But Law did offer hope—through a genuine and heartfelt conversion, and the living of an ascetic, penitentially laborious life.
George did not die that day, nor the next. In fact, to his great surprise, he lived for four more decades to be a very old man indeed.
* * *
WHEN PSALMANAZAR HAD recuperated and returned to London in 1728, he was a changed man. He lived simply and sparsely, and wrote from seven in the morning to seven at night, taking on grueling literary hackwork, contributing to weighty shelf-breakers like A General History of Printing (1732) and the massive multivolume Universal History (1736–50). When he contributed an anonymous article on Formosa to Emanuel Bowen’s Complete System of Geography (1747), it was to attack the frauds of … George Psalmanazar. By then he was refusing any sort of byline; he did not want his name before the public anymore.
Decades passed. The man who had once been an idle impostor became a beloved fixture around his lodgings on Ironmongers Row, with children and adults alike greeting the pious old man as he stepped outside each day. He had become so steeped in theology and translation that he taught himself Hebrew, and visited synagogues around London in order to stay in practice. He also tried his hand at “a tragi-comic piece, entitled David and Michal, in Hebrew verse.” But though he was a master of fiction in his identity, the piety of his old age left him with surprisingly little talent in printed fiction. Shortly after Samuel Richardson published Pamela, one of the first successful novels in the English language, George eagerly sent him a chapter for a sequel volume. It was pretty poor stuff, stuffed with religious sentiment; the manuscript, which still survives, includes Richardson’s comment “Ridiculous & improbable” scrawled in the margins.
George also made one truly appalling error in his old age. Like many people of his time, after taking a nightly tincture of opium as a curative during a painful illness, he found himself hopelessly addicted to it. Searching desperately for a cure, he found a tract published by one Dr. Jones, titled Mystery of Opium. Experimenting with its recommendations, Psalmanazar found he could “strip the opium of all its pernicious qualities” of addiction by boiling it in a solution of juice squeezed from Seville oranges, along with a few alkali powders mixed in. The acid and alkali would react and bubble up in a scummy froth; skim it off, and you were left with opium that was healthy and wholesome. Psalmanazar recommended it heartily to his friends and fellow churchgoers, and soon they were enthusiastically juicing oranges and cooking up.
After a while, Psalmanazar was back to his daily habit of ten spoonfuls of opium. He never did manage to shake it. The orange juice hadn’t worked, of course. And with great chagrin, the God-fearing old man realized that he’d got his friends and neighbors hooked on it as well.
* * *
TAKING A BREAK from his long hours of writing, George would repair to an alehouse on Old Street, where he’d meet with a promising young writer friend named Samuel Johnson. In later years, Johnson told his biographer Boswell that he preferred Psalmanazar’s company above anyone else’s in London. “George Psalmanazar’s piety, penitence and virtue,” he commented to another friend, “exceeded almost what we read as wonderful even in the lives of the saints.”
Johnson, like Psalmanazar, had been deeply moved by Law’s Serious Call to Devotion, and the two found a common bond in their religious belief. But sometimes Samuel could not contain his curiosity about George’s past.
—About Formosa …
And George would give him such a deeply pained look that Samuel would immediately stop his sentence. “I should as soon think of contradicting a Bishop,” he later told Boswell.
On another occasion he ventured one more question.
—Why do you keep the name Psalmanazar, if it is not your real name?
Psalmanazar’s pained look returned.
—Because, he explained, I deserve no other name other than that of an impostor.
Psalmanazar was nearing eighty by now; nearly everyone that he had cheated of sympathy and alms was now long dead. He needed no forgiveness from them, as they’d died blissfully unaware of his deception, and content in the knowledge that they’d helped a poor Formosan traveler. But Psalmanazar himself had been sentenced to a long life, and he had never forgiven himself for what he had done.
* * *
AFTER PSALMANAZAR’S DEATH in 1763, a bundle of papers was discovered in his desk; included in them was one bearing this title:
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ME A POOR SINFUL AND WORTHLESS CREATURE COMMONLY KNOWN BY THE ASSUMED NAME OF GEORGE PSALMANAZAR
In it, he left all his possessions to his faithful housekeeper, Sarah. He also directed that some money be set aside to publish the memoir that he had left in his desk; he said it would provide a full accounting of his misdeeds.
Then, George begged to be consigned to oblivion:
I desire that my body, when or wherever I die, may be … conveyed to the common burying-ground, and there interred in some obscure corner of it without further ceremony or formality than is used to the bodies of deceased pensioners where I happen to die, and at about the same time of the day, and that the whole be performed in the cheapest and lowest manner. And it is my earnest request, that my body not be enclosed in any kind of coffin, but only decently laid in what is called a shell of the lowest value, and without lid or other covering which may hinder the natural earth from covering it all around.
He was to be laid in the earth like a pauper, the grave unmarked. Nobody knew where George Psalmanazar had come from. Now, nobody was to know where he had gone. It would be as if the man had never existed.
* * *
TWO YEARS LATER, his Memoirs of **** were published; they have never been reprinted since. In them, he admits everything. But there was one secret that the man who called himself George Psalmanazar took to his obscure grave, one that more than three centuries have failed to prize from his grasp.
His real name.