George Psalmanaazaar: The Fake Formosan

Impostors, especially successful ones, offer interesting subjects for study. This is probably because the temptation to claim that we are something more than we are—more experienced, more successful, more intelligent as human beings—is commoner than many of us would be prepared to admit.

And though we ought perhaps to be indignant at the deceit, there is also something that approaches satisfaction in the example of a man clever enough to hoodwink the so-called experts among his fellow-men. And the cleverer the hoax, the more we may admire the hoaxer.

Of the numerous instances of “distinguished impostures” that history offers, few have the fascination of that perpetrated at the beginning of the eighteenth century by a Frenchman, whose real name remains unknown, but who called himself George Psalmanaazaar after Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, in the second book of Kings.