The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-century Formosan Hoax 081433198X, 9780814331989

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Tretended JPlsian George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax

M IC H A E L KEEVAK

\Y WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS D ETR O IT

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Fig. 9. Published version of Psalmanazar’s Formosan alphabet table. Courtesy of National Taiwan University Library.

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Fig. 16. The Lord’s Prayer in a Formosan aboriginal language tran­ scribed using Psalmanazar’s alphabet ( lower left) (Auer, Das Vater- Unser in mehr als 200 Sprachen und Mundarten mit Originaltypen). Courtesy of British Library.

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from around the world (see figure 17).63 In some sense Psalmana­ zar’s characters have become little more than an excuse to exhibit the bravura of the Imperial printing house,64but in the process his alphabet has also been mysteriously streamlined and simplified, with four of the original letters—jrw/i/o, xatara, zamphi, and fan­ dom—being removed altogether!

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Fig. 17. Formosan alphabet table (third column from left) (Auer, Das Vater-Unser in mehr als 200 Spracben und Mundarten mit Originaltypen). Courtesy of British Library.

The names of the letters are not provided here, just their pho­ netic equivalents expressed in roman, and the “s,” “x,” “z,” and “f ” sounds have simply been excised. The only explanation for this seems to be that three of those sounds (“x,” “z,” and “f ”) do not actually appear in Junius’s transcription (as given in Schulze), and the fourth sound (the “s” of samdo), which appears in both Souaja and kasasamagang, is rewritten with hamno instead—now given the supplementary sound “ch,” which in Psalmanazar’s original chart was one of the powers of samdo. Xatara, zampbi, and fandcm were thus superfluous and “unnecessary,” and samdo was simply incorpo-

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rated into hamno, even if it might seem odd that no “s” sound as such was included in Auer’s now sixteen-letter Formosan alphabet. T he uniquely shaped “p” in Schulze has also been incorporated into the Formosan alphabet as printed in Auer, and finally, the tri­ angularly placed dots given at the end of the text are now “defined” as a pause mark. This last detail I am unable to explain.65 We can easily see, however, that in an astonishingly backward way Junius’s “authentic” Lord’s Prayer text, even if there were still disputes about how it should be transcribed into roman letters, finally determined the shape of Psalmanazar’s Formosan alphabet itself, which had reached a new level of participation as a do-ityourself tongue even as Psalmanazar no longer needed to be men­ tioned at all. For a brief moment, in other words, his Description had been entirely separated not only from its ethnographical claims but even from its own language samples, leaving only an alphabet that could still be absorbed into the increasingly scientif­ ic study of actual Formosan languages. It is predictable, then, that someone might come along who would try to rejoin them, to argue, in short, that Psalmanazar’s alphabet might not be complete­ ly fictitious after all. This amazing climax, in a tortuous tale full of amazing climaxes, was reached near the end of the nineteenth cen­ tury in a long essay on Formosan languages published in 1887 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society by Albert Etienne Terrien de Lacouperie, professor of Indo-Chinese philology at the University of London and one of the leading Sinologists of his day. Western contact with Formosa had only recently begun again, and the numerous dialects spoken on the island also became the object of intense scholarly study once more. The real focus of Terrien’s essay, in fact, is a small group of newly discovered eighteenth-cen­ tury documents written in Formosan dialects that use Latin letters as well as Chinese characters, thus proving that even one hundred years after the Dutch expulsion some of the natives had continued to transcribe their languages as they had been taught by their mis­ sionary schoolmasters. The documents, Terrien begins, were forwarded to him by the Chinese secretary at the British Consular Service in Beijing, who, in his own notes accompanying the documents, had added the fol­ lowing remarks: I should like to have added to this list [of Formosan vocabulary words] a vocabulary of the Formosan dialect which George

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Psalmanazar spoke so fluently [sic!]. Do you not think it very possi­ ble that he may have fallen across a vocabulary of one of these dialects, written by a Dutch missionary, and have learnt it by rote? It has always been supposed that George invented a language, but is not the theory which I suggest more probable? It would be interest­ ing to re-examine the question under this light.66

Terrien, surprisingly enough, not only decided to take this sugges­ tion seriously but even managed to contrive an argument to sup­ port it. Briefly put, if I understand him correctly, the similarity between Psalmanazar’s alphabet and the plate published in Schulze suggests that the “Formosan” alphabet may in fact be authentic rather than just the opposite; since Schulze (and following him, Auer) is merely transcribing the Lord’s Prayer text out of Junius, and since Psalmanazar, who was unaware of Junius’s book, provides a Lord’s Prayer text in Latin letters only perhaps that alphabet really did come from Junius or from some other authentic source. If Psalmanazar had actually invented the Formosan alphabet, Terrien imagines, he would have written his Lord’s Prayer in it instead of in Latin letters.67As always, this cannot really be checked since Junius’s reading book has been lost, and Terrien pays no heed to Psalmanazar’s own claim in the Memoirs that soon after his arrival in London he produced for Bishop Compton a Lord’s Prayer in Formosan characters as well (Mem 215).68 One might well wonder how all of this has infiltrated an oth­ erwise erudite ethnographical study of Formosan aboriginal tribes and their languages. And yet for Terrien, perhaps his broader schol­ arly concerns (particularly in the non-Chinese origins of Chinese culture) rendered a completely “foreign” form of Formosan writing an especially attractive possibility,69 but the desire to prove this based on the evidence of a confessed impostor has led him to extreme, and often careless, contentions.70 Moreover, the fact that Psalmanazar created his script out of whole cloth could actually be used to argue that “the adaptation of the Formosan alphabet is not a fact of simple transmission and intercourse”—similar, he says, to the frequent hybrid forms found in other local scripts as a result of foreign invasion or influence.71 Psalmanazar himself, of course, put forward a similar argument about his prophet namesake and the Formosans’ dual rejection of Chinese characters and their “improvements” on Japanese ones (DF1 268). In any case, Terrien

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then makes the somewhat incredible claim that while Psalmanazar (“an ignorant and ill-informed man”) was certainly a fake, and his translations of the Lord’s Prayer, Apostle’s Creed, and Ten Commandments were also without doubt forged, he may have “come across some information concerning a [real] dialect of Formosa through a Portuguese, not through a Dutch source.”72 This is because a number of his “Formosan” words seem to resemble Portuguese,73 even as some of his supposedly made-up terms—and especially the names for Formosan numbers—do in fact share affinities with authentic local and regional dialects.74 Finally, Terrien hypothesizes, “Psalmanazar was not acquainted with any Formosan dialect himself, b u t . . . he had got hold of some notes written by an ignorant Portuguese mariner, who in his trav­ els in the eastern seas, and probably on the coast of Formosa, had there picked up some words, which he completed with some other Malay and Portuguese terms.”75 While this position is, to say the least, extreme, we can also see that it stands firmly in a long line of confused fantasies about the “real” as opposed to the “forged” with regard to Psalmanazar’s Formosa, and much like other ethnograph­ ic and linguistic accounts it takes a peculiar stance somewhere between the two. It was hardly the last of its kind either; in 1930 another Formosan authority, even as he reviewed known data about aboriginal dialects and at once affirmed that Psalmanazar was only an impostor, went on to speculate that in reality he might have been a Protestant minister who was actually born on the island under Dutch occupation!76 As in our discussions in the previous chapter, where we exam­ ined Psalmanazar as a European-looking Asian, it would be possible to extend an analysis of confusions regarding his language—and not just its alphabet—almost indefinitely. The complexity of his linguis­ tic forgery had also never been forgotten, and indeed it seems to reverberate more regularly and at a much later date than his more general Formosan claims.77 But in nearly all of these linguistic discussions, it is remarkable the degree to which everything was made to depend on the accuracy of the most “authentic” Lord’s Prayer text from Junius even though it was untraceable, on the supposition that he had simply recorded one of many dialects spoken on die island, and on the argument that in any case Junius’s text was never exactly the same each time it was reprinted.78Any ver­ sion, including Psalnianazar’s forged one, was not fixed and absolute,

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and even Baumgarten, who had supposedly seen Junius’s reading book and could thus simply copy out the “real” text, simultaneously claimed that Psalmanazar’s alternative version may have some kind of authenticity after all: “It is clear,” he writes, “t hat . . . if [Psalmanazar’s Lord’s Prayer version] was not completely made up, like most of the entire book, it was at least not written in the native language of the islanders, but instead in that of one of the neighboring tribes, several of which also exist on the island.”79As in so many explanations both before and since, Psalmanazar’s disguise can be both fictional and somehow salvageable at the same time, since there was always “another” Formosa, and other Formosan languages, that literally or figuratively lay beyond the mountains. And having Junius’s “authen­ tic” language sample, much like Candidius’s “eyewitness” account of the inhabitants of the island, wasn’t enough to determine anything. Indeed, I would contend that Psalmanazar’s fake language was his most far-reaching and accomplished creation of all, and that it is also what sets the Description apart from other imaginary or fallacious travel narratives. It was certainly recognized as such by his contem­ poraries,80 even if others occasionally claimed that his greatest mis­ take, in fact, was to allow this part of his forgery to appear in print, since then it had been “fixed” and was thus open to unimpeachable counterevidence.81 Some, such as the earl of Pembroke, had imme­ diately abandoned Psalmanazar when they heard a particularly pre­ posterous detail (in this case, that ancient Greek was taught in Formosan schools) (Mem 289-90),82 but in fact there seems to have been no such “fatal flaw” in the imposture that definitively exposed it to detection. One might even argue that the publication of the Description (and especially its chapter on language) actually ensured that the forgery would be able to continue, not only because of the undeniable skill and cleverness with which Psalmanazar had worked out his “wholly new and surprizing” Formosan identity (Mem 217), but because of the way that the disguise, like the language itself, was perceived as so “regular and grammatical” that it could not possibly have been faked. As a reviewer of the Memoirs put it, Psalmanazar “carried on a system of artifice and falshood for half a century together, undetected to the last.”83 His Formosan language, I would like to argue, is not just the supreme example of (or figure for) this kind of systematization, but in fact the center and indeed the origin of the forgery as a

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whole. The Memoirs quite clearly and proudly states that the alphabet (in an inchoate form) had come first, even before the res­ olution to become Formosan rather than Japanese. In his own mind, at least, but also apparently in the minds of his contempo­ raries, it seemed that language—as opposed to appearance, demeanor, or geography—served as the major determinant of one’s identity. One of Fontaney’s chief reasons for thinking him an impostor was that he spoke “the languages of Europe without any Asiatic accent”; and according to Psalmanazar’s version of his interviews with the Royal Society, Dr. Mead judged him to be German or Dutch based on his pronunciation.84 These may seem like rather thin reasons for determining (what we would now call) one’s ethnicity or one’s nation, but we have to pay heed to what it meant even to conceive of another cul­ ture in the early eighteenth century, when, in a manner of speak­ ing, even foreign languages were understood mainly in terms of their relationship to the Lord’s Prayer. Psalmanazar’s made-up lan­ guage, too, was eminently comparable, unintelligible yet easily masterable, exotic and familiar, antipodal and yet comfortably Latinate. The key, as always, was its consistency and its regularity, and as in all aspects of his elaborate imposture, the uniformity of his language and its alphabet ensured that they could continue to function even as they became increasingly isolated from the impos­ tor himself, and even as the name Psalmanazar had become little more than a byword for fraud or deception in general. Regularity, in fact, is also what binds together Psalmanazar the impostor and Psalmanazar the convert, and this is the subject of chapter 4.

C

hapter

4

The Jew Psalmanazar I never yet saw a regular family unless it were that o f M rs H ariots, n o r a regular man except M r Cam pbel whose exactness I know only by his own report, and Psalmanazar whose life was I think, uniform . Samuel Johnson (1770) [Psalmanazar] was n o t the famous wanderingjew, as som e o f his acquain­ tance, o f the wiser sort, used to suspect. . . . T h e vulgar m ight perhaps be induced to form this conjecture, from his venerable long beard, and singular garb; beside which he had other peculiarities about him, all cal­ culated to keep up the appearance of a m ost mysterious secrecy: but the general notion that he understood all languages, and had visited all coun­ tries, m ore especially contributed to prove him the very identical w an­ dering Jew. Monthly Review (1764)

Charles Walckenaer, Psalmanazar’s first real biographer, began his early-nineteenth-century essay on the fake Formosan by noting that his long and complex life appeared to fall into two distinct parts— so distinct, in fact, that they hardly seemed to belong to the same person.1Sometime in the late 1720s, according to his own account, Psalmanazar retired to a life of obscurity and increasingly sacred scholarship, and readers have been wrestling with this discrepancy ever since. For how does one reconcile the con man with the convert, the audacious author of the Description of Formosa and other early texts with the sober, anonymous narrative voice of the essays on miracles or the gigantic Universal History? Psalmanazar lived for another sixty years after his Description first appeared, and although the postimposture period is far longer and far more complicated, it remains overshadowed by the fact that our main source of informa­ tion is the Memoirs, where the story of the trickster’s progress is told only from the perspective of a man who had already “changed” into something else. Indeed, Psalmanazar was himself a kind of island, a

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sealed-off network of interrelated claims that nothing could really permeate or correct, and this is compounded by the fact that what we do know about him is taken almost entirely from his own posthumously published—and largely unverifiable—confession. The Memoirs takes the form of a conversion narrative, if not necessarily a criminal biography,2 a recanting confession in which the speaker recounts a long list of (now neatly organized) misdeeds, leading to his contrite and “authentic” self in the present. But is this an example of repentance or continuing self-advertisement? One cannot help feeling that, as in perhaps all conversion stories, the speaker is glorying in the very errors that he simultaneously renounces. This is the tale of a young man who started out with nothing, and purely by means of his own intelligence and his own ingenuity had managed to mount a complex and detailed disguise that successfully, if only briefly, withstood the scrutiny of even the most learned Europeans. Many readers have remained skeptical of his supposed conversion, arguing that this change of heart was every bit as sensational and hollow as the imposture itself, that Psalmana­ zar’s Grub Street existence and his withdrawal from the world were simply a matter of necessity or of avoidance, and that the “pious fraud” remained, until the end of his life, nothing but a scoundrel.3 As an 1844 reviewer for the Penny Magazine put it, “the man was never sincere.”4 Others have responded more sympathetically, taking the story of Psalmanazar’s repentance at face value or, at the very least, seek­ ing some sort of continuity between the earlier and later stages of his life. I do not propose to answer the question as to whether he was a “sincere” convert or not, since I don’t find this particular debate an especially useful or even interesting one. I, too, would argue that the “new” Psalmanazar is not substantially different from the “old” one, but not simply because he continued to play the deceiver until the day he died, refusing to reveal his real identity or apologize publicly for his earlier transgressions. Previous attempts to detect traces of the youthful charlatan in his later writings have also proved largely unsatisfying, despite some occasional thematic similarities, since his unwillingness even to broach the subject of his early career seems remarkably absolute, and even when the topic of Formosa does crop up, as in the entry on the island he compiled for the Complete System of Geography in 1747, a careful distance is kept between that “other” impostor and the now anonymous middle-

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aged scholar who refers to himself only in the third person.5To the end Psalmanazar seemed unwilling to allow even the smallest crack in the wall separating the two phases of his life. And yet I would also like to claim that we might better under­ stand the later Psalmanazar from an examination of the way he had created and perfected his Formosan identity decades before. In other words, his numerous later roles—history writer, religious authority, Hebrew scholar—were fashioned along principles that had remained largely unchanged from his first resolve to become a Formosan (or even earlier, a Japanese or an Irishman). This line of examination was begun in the first chapters of this study in the analysis of the way the impostor was able to use objections against his Formosan identity claims to his own advantage, by realizing that what was in fact already known about Formosa or Japan or China was not in itself a hindrance to the free space that he had managed to clear for his own, more “accurate” Description of the island and its people. The fact that he might have been fair skinned, or that he spoke Latin, or that he claimed Greek was taught in Formosan schools, never really stood in his way, despite occasional objections on these or other purely empirical grounds. I have also tried to show that the “key” to this sort of self-fashioning lay in Psalmanazar’s fas­ cination and indeed obsession with the formation and evolution of a private language, and that the linguistic factors of his deception were not only the most important ones for the impostor himself but also what attracted and entangled his audience for many years to come. Even if no one still believed that Psalmanazar was from Formosa or that his Description of the island could be taken serious­ ly, his Formosan language took on a life of its own and remained a “real” tongue that could be successfully subjected to scholarly linguistic study. His interest in language continued throughout his life, and if he at last turned to the study of Hebrew it similarly allowed him to form one last identity: that of a Jew. In order to discern this development more clearly, we should begin with Samuel Johnson, who spoke of the now reformed Formosan with a surprising degree of reverence, and whose opin­ ion, I will argue, remains one of the most perspicacious. Johnson met Psalmanazar sometime in the early 1740s. His scattered com­ ments form a small body of evidence that is routinely cited, but without, I think, a real understanding of what lies at the heart of his interest in—or rather his reading of—the old man’s final period.6

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For Johnson did not merely admire the former Formosan’s change of heart or his laborious, uncomplaining toil as a Grub Street writer (another form of imposture), he also perceived in him a certain kind of regularity that perfectly characterizes the way that Psalmanazar had proceeded all along. I have up to now referred to this quality as his consistency—never going back on any of his claims, slowly building up a body of vocabulary and a grammar of his made-up language—but we can now open up our inquiry a bit more to include what, for Johnson, included a fundamentally religious as well as political and ideological aspect. Several Psalmanazar references occur in Boswell’s Life of Johnson,7 the first of them being in connection with Innes, another swindler, who in 1728 (exactly the time of Psalmanazar’s conversion) had published someone else’s manuscript on moral virtue—note the irony—under his own name.8 Boswell’s papers also include a note identifying Innes as “the clergyman who brought Psalmanazar to England and suggested his imposture,” and Boswell adds that “Johnson told Mr. Seward that when Innys and he talked of the scheme Psalmanazar shewed him the Lord’s prayer in his made lan­ guage” and “Innys put it into his pocket & desired he might write it over again.”9T he impostor himself, of course, gave a slightly differ­ ent version of this story in the Memoirs, where Innes successfully tripped him up by asking him to translate a passage from Cicero instead (Mem 184). And yet Johnson’s rendition is also entirely appropriate, since, as we have seen in chapter 3, Psalmanazar’s Formosan Lord’s Prayer quickly became a central feature of the imposture as a whole. Johnson also mentions Psalmanazar in a con­ versation from 1778: On Saturday . . . I drank tea with [Johnson]. He praised the late Mr. Duncombe, of Canterbury, as a pleasing man. “He used to come to me: I did not seek much after him. Indeed I never sought much after any body.” b o s w e l l . “Lord Orrery, I suppose.” J o h n s o n . “No, Sir; I never went to him but when he sent for me.” b o s w e l l . “Richardson?” j o h n s o n . “Yes, Sir. But I sought after George Psalmanazar the most. I used to go and sit with him at an alehouse in the city.”10 In a similar vein, Boswell recalled an occasion when Johnson, “talk­ ing of George Psalmanazar, whom he reverenced for his piety . . . , said, ‘I should as soon think of contradicting a b i s h o p .’ ” 11 This last

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anecdote is borrowed from an earlier one published in John Hawkins’s edition of Johnson’s works in 1787: He was very well acquainted with Psalmanazar, the pretended Formosan, and said, he had never seen the close of the life of any­ one that he wished so much his own to resemble, as that of him, for its purity and devotion. He told many anecdotes of him; and said he was supposed by his accent to have been a Gascon. He said, that Psalmanazar spoke English with the city accent, and coarsely enough. He for some years spent his evenings at a publick house near Old-Street, where many persons went to talk with him; Johnson was asked whether he ever contradicted Psalmanazar;—“I should as soon,” said he, “have thought of contradicting a bishop”; so high did he hold his character in the latter part of his life. When he was asked whether he had ever mentioned Formosa before him, he said, he was afraid to mention even China.12

Or as Hawkins noted in his Life of Samuel Johnson, published in the same year, Johnson “would frequently mention, with great energy and encomiums, the penitence of the man who assumed the name . . . of George Psalmanazar,” a man who in his own neighborhood “was so well known and esteemed th a t. . . scarce any person, even children, passed him without showing him the usual signs of respect.”13 N ot a few readers have been surprised to learn that Psalmanazar was so highly regarded, or that Johnson—famous for his antipathy toward forgery of all sorts (Lauder’s falsifications of Milton, Macpherson’s imaginary Celtic bard Ossian)—might have sought out Psalmanazar rather than the other way round.14 Lastly, it is difficult to imagine anyone whom Samuel Johnson, of all peo­ ple, might have been afraid to offend, much less to contradict. In any case we have no actual account of their conversations; Boswell would surely have described them if he could, but he met Johnson for the first time the very same year Psalmanazar died (barely two weeks later, in fact).15 We should add to this body of evidence the opinion of Hester Thralé (later Piozzi), who never actually met Psalmanazar either, but who remained for many years one of Johnson’s closest confi­ dantes. “W hen I asked Dr. Johnson,” she writes in her Anecdotes, “who was the best man he had ever known? ‘Psalmanazar,’ was the unexpected reply.” And “with regard to true Christian perfection, I have heard Johnson say, ‘that George Psalmanazar’s piety, peni­ tence, and virtue exceeded almost what we read as wonderful even

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The J ew Psalmanazar

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in the lives of saints.’” Yet, she also notes, “though there was much esteem . .. , there was I believe but little confidence between them; they conversed merely about general topics, religion and learning, of which both were undoubtedly stupendous examples.” It is no small praise, of course, to couple Psalmanazar’s “stupendous” learning with the likes of Johnson, but Mrs. Thrale also correctly divined that part of Johnson’s admiration for Psalmanazar was due to his linguistic fluency. He “possessed more of the English lan­ guage than any one of the other foreigners who had separately fallen in [Johnson’s] way,” she writes, and then adds:

much more than a “Fair Penitent,” as is demonstrated by Boswell’s next reference, which is also much more telling since it appears in the context of one of Johnson’s favorite topics—Grub Street:

I forget in what year it was that this extraordinary person lived and died at a house in Old-street, where Mr. Johnson was witness to his talents and virtues, and to his final preference of the church of England, after having studied, disgraced, and adorned so many forms of worship. The name he went by, was not supposed by his friend [Johnson] to be that of his family, but all enquiries were vain; his reasons for concealing his original were penitentiary; he deserved no other name than that of the impostor, he said. That portion of the Universal History which was written by him, does not seem to me to be composed with peculiar spirit, but all traces of the wit and the wanderer were probably worn out before he undertook the work.—His pious and patient endurance of a tedious illness, ending in an exemplary death, confirmed the strong impression his merit had made upon the mind of Mr. Johnson. “It is so very difficult (said he, always) for a sick man not to be a scoundrel.”16

As Boswell concludes, “in pleasant reference to himself and Mr. Hoole, as brother authors, [Johnson] often said, ‘Let you and I, Sir, go together, and eat a beef-steak in Grub-street.’”19 For Johnson, the penurious and silent toil of hack writing—hiding or forging one’s own identity as a ghostwriter, subsuming one’s own invention and creativity into the exigencies of the contemporary literary marketplace—was a “regular” education of the kind that he himself had finally managed to rise above. But Psalmanazar’s regularity represented, I would argue, something that ran even deeper than this. Johnson was of course notorious for surrounding himself with a variety of eccentric characters,20 and the long since reformed Formosan impostor might have seemed like a special prize, yet the solidarity he felt with Psalmanazar must have symbolized a partic­ ular kind of “purity and devotion” (as Hawkins terms it) that Johnson felt he himself, despite his own success, was never able to attain. He “had never seen the close of the life of anyone that he wished so much his own to resemble.” Psalmanazar stood not only for Johnson’s own former life as a Grub Street writer but also as a moral and religious ideal. Regularity, in fact, is one of the most resonant and complex ideas in the whole of Johnson’s works. To date, the best study of this theme (or rather obsession) in the Johnson corpus is Thomas Reinert’s Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd, which provides a surprisingly large amount of material evidence attesting to the importance and the pervasiveness of the idea throughout Johnson’s career.21Reinert’s real interest is Johnson’s politics, and his study expertly demonstrates Johnson’s complex attitudes toward the place of the individual as opposed to the universal and the inevitably arbitrary nature of all forms of political and moral authority.,Here,

Psalmanazar’s “piety, penitence, and virtue”—as well as his “exem­ plary death”—were already legendary, even if Mrs. Thrale couldn’t refrain from adding her own skepticism about the impostor’s “final preference” for Anglicanism, “after having studied, disgraced, and adorned so many forms of worship.” She is also not the first read­ er to expect to find something of the old impostor in the Universal History, and likewise not the first to wonder what had happened to the spirit of “the wit and the wanderer” in those dry tomes.17 Instead, she only found “a Touch of his old Effrontery” when the real Formosa was once mentioned in a footnote. “I have heard Mr. Johnson say,” she commented, that “Psalmanazar was the best Man he ever knew—if he play’d these Tricks ,however, he was not the Fair Penitent.”18 , Yet for Johnson it is d e a r that Psalmanazar had remained

Mr. Hoole told [Johnson], he was born in Moorfields, and had received part of his early instruction in Grub-street. “Sir, (said Johnson, smiling,) you have been regularly educated.” Having asked who was his instructor, and Mr. Hoole having answered, “My uncle, Sir, who was a taylor”; Johnson, recollecting himself, said, “Sir, I knew him; we called him the metaphysical taylor. He was of a club in Old-street, with me and George Psalmanazar, and some others.”

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however, I concentrate on regularity in a more religious and indeed mundane sense (in a superficial if not theologically specific form of Methodism), as is reflected in the definitions Johnson provides for the Dictionary. In addition to more common uses such as “agreeable to rule” or “governed by strict regulations,” regular also occurs as a noun (from the French regulier), with an example taken from John Ayliffe’s Parergon juris canonici anglicani, a treatise on ecclesiastical law from 1726: “In the Romish church, all persons are said to be regulars, that do profess and follow a certain rule of life, in Latin stiled regula-, and do likewise observe the three approved vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”22A friar is similarly defined as “a brother of some regular order.”23 The fourth edition of the Dictionary adds one more adjectival definition, with an illustration from Law’s Serious Call, the text that had such a marked influence on the impostor (and, indeed, on Johnson himself): “More people are kept from a true sense and taste of religion, by a regular kind of sensuality and indulgence, than by gross drunkenness.”24 Regularity, thus, was also a specifically moral and religious term that, in its simplest but most profoundly important sense, had to do with patterning one’s life according to Christian principles (and in its most extreme form, even living a monastic life). Johnson uses the term repeatedly in his prayers and meditations, when, for example, he asks God to “deliver me from habitual wickedness, and idleness, enable me to purify my thoughts, to use the faculties which thou has given me with honest diligence, and to regulate my life by thy holy word.”25 To regulate oneself, for Johnson, was a fundamental ordering after the most generalized and ecumenical Christian model, of regulating one’s daily life not only in terms of study or work habits (and Johnson is less kind toward other writ­ ers, such as Milton or Swift, whose routines of self-discipline were equally well known), but also by means of a schedule of prayers, signs, and testaments to one’s faith in God. Law’s Serious Call, at its most basic structural level, is also an exhortation to schedule one’s life “regularly,” even if Johnson’s thinking diverged from Law’s in a great many ways, and even if there were numerous other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theologians who used the same terminology.26 At issue here is a rudimentary ethical notion of good habit (habitus or consuetudo) as the key to the acquisition of virtue, a con­

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cept that stretches back to Augustine, Aristotle, and beyond.27 The essential disorder that Johnson felt within himself (Boswell signifi­ cantly calls it an “aversion to regular life”)28 may well be the reason why he was filled with such amazement and veneration toward Psalmanazar, who took the idea of regularity to its opposite extreme, not only managing to survive the hand-to-mouth existence of Grub Street for many decades by working “from seven in the morning to seven at night,” but whose “self-denial, self-abhorrence, fasting, solitude, meditation, [and] self-examination” had gradually directed him to “a more regular way of thinking and acting” (Mem 19, 21, 63). And by the end of his life, Psalmanazar’s regularity seemed to have covered every aspect of his existence; the preface to the Memoirs ends with several remarkable pages in which he describes how he was even able to systematize his lifelong addiction to laudanum, reducing his daily intake from “ten or twelve spoonfuls morning and night, and very often more” to only a few drops in a glass of punch after a long day of studying and writing (Mem 59-62).29 One could hardly imagine Johnson managing to regulate himself in such a fashion, despite his frequent avowals that he was going to do so; despite having eked a living out of the hard labor of Grub Street writing, he appears to have led a life that in its out­ ward form was much closer to the likes of Richard Savage, whose intrinsic irregularity was a central theme (and allure) in Johnson’s biography of him. It is in such a context, moreover, that our most telling Johnsonian meditation on Psalmanazar appears, also print­ ed in his Diaries, Prayers, and Annals-. Every Man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolu­ tions, nor is he convinced of his imbecillity but by length of time, and frequency to experiment. This opinion of our own constancy is so prevalent, that we always despise him who suffers his general and settled purpose to be overpowered by an occasional desire. They therefore whom frequent failures have made desperate cease to form resolutions, and they who are become cunning do not tell them. Those who do not make them, are very few, but of their effect little is perceived, for scarcely any man persists in a course of life planned , by choice, but as he is restrained from deviation by some external power. He who may live as he will, seldom lives long in the obser­ vation of his own rules. I never yet saw a regular family unless it ' were that of Mrs Ilariots, nor a regular man except Mr Campbel " whose exactness I know only by his own report, and Psalmanazar whose life was 1 think, uniform. 1

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Even more than in earlier references to Psalmanazar, in other words, the idea of a regular or “uniform” life became inseparable from Johnson’s own “frequent failures” to achieve one; Psalmanazar’s achievement lay in the fact that he was able to persevere, for some sixty years, “in a course of life planned by choice.” Psalmanazar, in a word, had managed to become what Johnson could never be: a convert. To be sure, all of this may seem a rather sentimental and old-fashioned reading of Johnson’s many idiosyncrasies, for which he was famous even in his own day, but I believe it is from such a perspective, both religious and secular, that one can best understand Psalmanazar’s own manner of forming his Formosan and other identities. Yet this is more than just a simple similarity between the pietistic regularity of his repentant old age and the consistently fraudulent regularity of his youthful impostures. It is not merely true that the regularity of his converted state is somehow prefigured by or patterned after the regularity with which he managed to create a Formosan persona, a Formosan culture, and a Formosan language. A reviewer of the Memoirs aptly refers to “the specious regularity of his behaviour.”31 For it is also true that, in a very important sense, Psalmanazar had gradually assumed a religious regularity as well. At the height of his imposture he not only pre­ tended to be a “regular Formosan” by systematizing his lies and retaining their details for later use, he also posed as a “Formosan regular”—a stereotypically antipodal, contemplative, and above all austere East Asian: a “Buddhist” or a “Confucian.”32 If we are to believe the Memoirs, even as a boy Psalmanazar learned from the example of his Franciscan and Dominican masters that he could “conceal [his] own defects and ignorance . . . under a monkish habit” (Mem 96). Moreover, after quitting his studies, he learned he could pass more easily by “pretending to be a sufferer for religion” (Mem 113), first as an Irish Catholic (Mem 117) and later as a Japanese one persecuted by the emperor (Mem 147). By posing as a pilgrim, speaking only in Fatin, and presuming “an outward form o[f] religion,” his disguise was, at first, complete (Mem 147-48). Part of his appeal, in short, must have lay in a fa?ade of abstemious self-control that he maintained throughout, whether or not, as he often claimed, his strict Catholic upbringing brought about an aversion to liquor (Mem 115, 153), swearing and gaming (Mem 160), or sexual enticements (Mem 102, 108, 151, 155). As a

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soldier he could thus differentiate himself not merely in terms of his pretended homeland but in terms of his moral uprightness as well. It enabled him briefly to land a position as a coffeehouse waiter in Aachen, once his employer had cleaned up his rags and presented him to beau monde society as an exotic curiosity (Mem 153-56). A bit later on, fearing the derision of his comrades in arms toward anyone “soberly or religiously inclined,” as he still considered himself to be, he shifted his disguise slightly to be an “unconverted” or “heathenish” Japanese instead, sensitive, as always, to the fact that his military audience would expect him “to appear as vile and abandoned as they,” and that it would be even more effective and attention-grabbing if the young Japanese took to uttering “new and fashionable oaths” or “monstrous curses” as “an awkward jest and ridicule of the most solemn and sacred truths of the Gospel.” Yet he remained, he says, “a sober young fellow, given to no vice” (Mem 162-63). He had managed to become, in short, “a moral heathen” (Mem 176). Psalmanazar describes himself as being most “regular” of all in terms of his sexuality, which, as Robert Adams Day has noted, seems a surprisingly absent element in the confessions of the Memoirs as well as in the Orientalist fantasies of the Description itself.33 The Memoirs shies away from sexual matters at a number of points, despite Psalmanazar’s claim that he was “naturally fond of ingratiating [himself] with the [female] sex” (Mem 108), and that his “great propensity to women was as strong as [his] vanity” (Mem 232). Just after leaving school to become a tutor, for exam­ ple, he successfully fended off the mother of one of his pupils (Mem 108-12). Even more interesting is his brush with a group of procuresses on the lookout for available young men, with the narrator claiming that the only thing that saved him was his state of lice-ridden vagrancy (Mem 150-51). There is also an unspeci­ fied “desperate piece of folly and madness” that he is almost guilty of at Aachen, certainly some form of prostitution and perhaps even same-sex prostitution, but he is once again rescued by his shabby appearance, his “cuticular disease” in particular (Mem 155-56). It is evident that at the height of his Formosan charade he was espe­ cially appealing to his female audience, as well as to female read­ ers,34 but sexual intrigues, if any had actually occurred, are clearly not the main interest of the imposture as it is recounted in the Memoirs. Inncs, on the contrary, is roundly and haughtily

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condemned for his “notorious and barefaced immoralities,” for his “almost insurmountable propensity to wine and women” (Mem 227). But Psalmanazar himself remained very much the Formosan “regular,” whose only vice, he repeatedly says, was vanity. “W ho could imagine,” he rhetorically asks, “that a youth of so much sense and learning . . . , so seemingly free from ambition and other vices, could be abandoned enough to be guilty of such abominable an imposture and impiety, for the sake of a little plain, homely food and rayment[?]” (Mem 200-1). W hether or not this “principle of virtue” was nothing more than an affectation, it was an integral part of his antipodal character as a noble savage. Psalmanazar saw to it not only that his “vain-glo­ rious foible” was “conceal[ed] . . . by the most opposite behaviour,” but also that his “conversation was such as the most censorious could not have blamed” (Mem 199-200). In this respect, as I have mentioned above, he was also playing the part of the dispassionate, inscrutable, but morally superior East Indian visitor to Europe, later typified (in England) by such fictional characters as Lien Chi Altangi, the narrator of Oliver Goldsmith’s epistolary novel, The Citizen of the World (1762), but also clearly patterned after travel books and anecdotes of actual Asian visitors who had occasionally turned up in the West. Psalmanazar may have insisted throughout that Formosa was part of antipodal Japan, but his pretensions to a scrupulously upright regularity were thoroughly patterned after a stereotype of the Chinese savant: the chaste, pious, humble, but above all highly educated philosopher-official.35Initially by sporting a pilgrim’s gown (and later, perhaps, some other kind of exotic “for­ eign” clothing) and by regularly attending church and being able to debate fine points of theology in the lingua franca of the clergy, Psalmanazar was able to achieve a necessary combination of the familiar and the irreducibly other, the exemplary Christian who was also a judicious Eastern sage, a Confucian stranger. This enabled him to embody a marginalized position of respect and dignity that could be reinforced by his (pretense of a) continent or even celibate lifestyle, a reverse of the example provided by early Jesuit mission­ aries to China who donned the robes of Buddhist monks in order, as they thought, to blend in with the local population and “become Chinese.”36 Psalmanazar’s success, in other words, must have been due not only to his prodigious memory and his sheer audacity but also to the fact that his stereotypically Buddhist regularity (which,

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as he puts it, even “the most censorious could not have blamed”) rendered his differences utterly unthreatening—despite such quirks as cannibalism or mass child sacrifice.37 Psalmanazar was thus a “pious fraud” both before and after his supposed conversion, and as Johnson, perhaps, had realized, Psalmanazar’s Grub Street education may have given him (like Hoole, like Johnson himself) a “regular” education. But there was also something more, and much more basic, to his “piety, penitence, and virtue” that went beyond a simple transformation from a life of deceit into a saintlike, hardworking existence. For even if his aim had been forgery, Psalmanazar had from the beginning chosen to live according to a principle (“in the observation of his own rules,” as Johnson put it); he had devoted himself to a consistency and a regu­ larity that were themselves a form of piety. But the effect was that Psalmanazar seemed to have gradually become the very identity he had worked so hard to create, even if the unassuming, obscure old man seemed a far cry from the brazen Formosan of old. It is also, ironically, what rendered him permanendy “Asian” in the minds of many of his contemporaries long after he had given up his Formosan guise. In the Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Tobias Smollett captured this perfectly when, again in the context of Grub Street, we encounter the particularly pathetic example of “Psalmonazar, [who] after having drudged half a century in the literary mill, in all the simplicity and abstinence of an Asiatic, subsists upon the charity of a few booksellers, just sufficient to keep him from the parish.”38 Perhaps he was no longer a Formosan, but his “Asiatic” “simplicity and abstinence” had remained intact—or, rather, were even intensi­ fied in his later period of contrition. T he point here is not whether Johnson’s reading of Psalmanazar is correct, or even whether my own reading of Johnson’s admiration for the former Formosan is appropriate, but that Johnson’s understanding of Psalmanazar as a “regular” in his later life goes a long way toward explaining his behavior as a Formosan as well. His regularity and uniformity throughout his life allowed him to build up a Formosan identity and a Formosan cul­ ture out of whole cloth, and by refusing to go back on anything he had once said he was capable of surviving even the criticisms of people who had been to East Asia, and indeed even if they had actually been to Formosa. The construction of a Formosan lan­ guage had worked along identical principles, despite considerable

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contemporary knowledge about local languages and about Chinese in particular. Father Fontaney complained that he was never able to elicit one intelligible Chinese word from Psalmanazar,39 and authentic samples from Formosan aboriginal tongues were readily available in contemporary Lord’s Prayer collections, but even expert testimony had little effect on Psalmanazar’s “regular” disguise. Perhaps he wasn’t even believed by large numbers of his audience, but they had few means at their disposal to disprove him, not only because of a relative ignorance among early-eighteenthcentury Europeans about “the real Formosa,” whatever that may have been to them, but also because of the fact that what he had built up wasn’t easy to dislodge. W hat we can see by the time of the Memoirs, in fact, is a recurring pattern in which Psalmanazar had posited a series of identities that he then became, mainly via an interest in languages, and that this can be seen playing itself out once more in his final obsession with Hebrew. In order to under­ stand this more completely we will have to return to the second half of his story as it is told in the Memoirs, the narrative of which, as soon as the original Formosan story is retold, strangely breaks down and becomes increasingly hard to follow. For after the impostor has given the details of his triumphant arrival in London, climaxing in the publication of his Description and its revision at Oxford, when he then returns to the metropolis to find that Innes had vanished, the continuity of the narrative crum­ bles. At least ten years pass without comment, when his notoriety was clearly on the wane (for example, Mem 233 and 251). Still pre­ tending to be Formosan, he returns to tutoring jobs and assorted projects such as fan painting and (in 1708) the “white sort of Japan.” Suddenly it is 1715 (Mem 240) and we have little idea about what had filled the intervening years. H e reenters a military regiment, tutors young men of means, and begins to receive an unspecified amount of money from a group of friends who had set up a subscrip­ tion on his behalf, and all this time, he says, he “still passed current for a Formosan” (Mem 242). “At length,” but precisely how and after how long we do not know, he becomes “acquainted with a per­ son who was concerned in various branches relating to the printing trade,” and the impostor “came at last to translate books” (Mem 248-49). From this point Psalmanazar embarks on his new career as a hackwriter—it is an easy transition from Formosan to literary hack

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or from translator of a made-up language to a translator of European ones. Psalmanazar had transformed from a Formosan impostor into a Grub Street one, but at the same time it is by means of language that he is able to shift identities once again and, ulti­ mately, to take on a new role—still a foreigner, of course—as a scholar of another Eastern language, Hebrew. “From translating of other people’s works,” he summarizes, “I came at length to print some of my own” (Mem 249). And yet he was still calling himself Psalmanazar, and even to his friends he remained unable to confess who he really was. He began to seek “solitude and retirement” as an antidote to his vain self-advertisement as a Formosan (Mem 255), and his new interest in scriptural texts led him eventually to Law’s Serious Call, which, he says, he “read . . . over and over, from beginning to end” (Mem 258)—as if, indeed, it were a kind of Bible. Law’s book, in other words, had succeeded in regularizing Psalmanazar’s scriptural study (whether it had proven to be an “answer” to the regularity of the Formosan language or just a means of molding the whole story of his life, in hindsight, into a common theme), forcing him to realize his “own want of knowl­ edge of the original Hebrew, and to bewail the loss of several opportunities [he] had missed of gaining a more perfect knowledge in that sacred and useful tongue” (Mem 260). At this point the Memoirs is interrupted by a seeming digression of more than twenty pages concerning the “original Hebrew” and how little was known about it because of faulty Latin translations then in use (Mem 260-282).40Yet at every point one cannot help but find strange similarities between the impostor’s dedication to his own Formosan language and this new, properly original, Asian tongue. Self-study led to “conversing with the Jews themselves” to learn the most authentic pronunciation (particularly “with some Morocco Jews”) (Mem 270-71), and his newfound fluency was aided by training himself actually “to think in Hebrew rather than in English, or any other language I was used to” (Mem 273). The creation of Formosan must have worked on similar principles. Psalmanazar’s progress in Hebrew, moreover, led to a plan (never fulfilled) of “compiling some scriptural Hebrew Dialogues . . . , and a set of others on more common subjects . .:. , for the encourage­ ment of young beginners; and a third between a Jew, and a Christian, on the most material points of controversy between us” (Mem 279). Perhaps the aim was very different, but this is also oddly reminiscent

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of the impostor’s own Dialogue between a Japonese and a Formosan, about Some Points of the Religion of the Time (1707), in which a strange­ ly Protestant-sounding Formosan native argues against the pure rationalism represented by his Japanese discussant.41 T he now converted impostor also resolved to publish a more authoritative annotated edition of the Psalms, but this never mate­ rialized either. Instead he was given the task of completing Samuel Palmer’s General History of Printing (1732) and became increasing­ ly involved in the Universal History (1736-65), for which he wrote the history of the Jews—“in which,” he says, “I was the most versed” (Mem 292). As he was no longer the impostor, at least in his own mind, the Memoirs barely returns to the subject of Formosa, and Psalmanazar now speaks firmly and thoroughly from his newfound perspective of biblical scholar, and of the Jews in particular. The final fifty or so pages are filled with tales of the difficulties of putting together such a large and unwieldy coopera­ tive project as the Universal History f for which Psalmanazar had become not only a chief contributor but the general—indeed, “universal”—spokesman. Formosa is barely mentioned now, ex­ cept to emphasize how far he had traveled from those vain shame­ ful days. For instance, when he encounters the earl of Pembroke, who thirty years earlier had condemned Psalmanazar for the claim that Greek was taught in Formosan schools, the now penitent charlatan manages to effect a reconciliation (Mem 289-90). And again, at the very end of the text, the newly sober impostor claims to have intentionally chosen to write the entry on Formosa for the Complete System of Geography (1747) so that he could “take occasion publickly to acknowledge . . . the falshood and imposture of [his] former account of that island” (Mem 339)—even if, since the entry was unsigned, an acknowledgment never really came about. More anecdotes follow about his pursuit of a new Hebrew psalter, but here the Memoirs ends, rather abruptly, and almost in mid-sen­ tence. For at least one mid-century reader, this curtness simply proved that the text was genuine, especially since the impostor had just gotten to the point in his story where he had begun to work on the modern part of the Universal History f And yet perhaps the Memoirs does have an ending: Psalmanazar the Jew. I would suggest that this final identity, or what Richard Swiderski has aptly called “an expertise equivalent to an identity,”44 is a singularly appropriate

T he Jew Psalmanazar end for “the wit and the wanderer” who had refused, to the last, to reveal his true nationality. For we mustn’t forget that Psalmanazar was always a foreigner, that from the very beginning he had labored hard to ensure that his true origins remained indeterminate or sim­ ply a matter of contingency. The tide page of the Description of Formosa refers to him as “a native of the said Island, now in London,” or as he had described himself in a letter to Reynolds from August 1704, he was “like a man drop’d down from ye clouds.”45 Psalman­ azar, in other words, always played the role of an outsider, an itin­ erant other, and it is no accident that this role, much like the early modern stereotype of (wandering) Jews, featured such character traits as multilingualism, secrecy, and a refusal to assimilate.46 Thus it is also appropriate that the only mention we have of Psalmanazar’s manner of dress refers to his “singular garb” in the context of an idea that he might really have been “the famous wandering Jew, as some of his acquaintance, of the wiser sort, used to suspect.” His costume, like all other aspects of his antipodal Formosan persona, had been “calculated to keep up the appearance of a most mysteri­ ous secrecy,” and thus “the general notion that he understood all languages, and had visited all countries, more especially contributed to prove him the very identical wandering Jew.”47 However, the suspicion or the outright claim that the “secret” to Psalmanazar’s identity was that he was really a Jew in disguise was not merely a function of his vast knowledge of the Hebrew Old Testament and Jewish history. For hadn’t he been a cultural alien all along, and indeed always preferring to remain as different as possible? Even as a young man, if we are to believe an anecdote told in the second preface to the second edition of the Description, upon enlisting as a hired soldier at Andernach, “when my Captain ask’d my name, that I might be enter’d in the Muster Roll, he took me for a Jew.” “You need not be afraid to tell your Religion,” the captain continued, “for be it what it will, you shall always have the free exercise of it; for here we tolerate all Religions, especially in times of War” (DF2 sig. b). Even if this conversation is fictional, it is at the same time indicative of a larger and easily traceable tendency to lump together non-Christian outsiders of any sort. And Psalmanazar’s “regularity,” as always, would only help to reinforce his “pagan” identity, whether he was pigeonholed as a Formosan or a Japanese or a Jew.48 Later on, of course, his refusal to “return” to a definitive or “authentic” nationality, whatever that may have been,

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kept him thoroughly marginal. The title of the Memoirs, far from identifying him definitively, refers to him only as “a Reputed Native of Formosa”—even if, as he also puts it, “out of Europe I was not born” (Mem 70). And given his fervent interest in Jewish culture and the Hebrew language, it is not surprising that his marginality might have endowed him with a reputation for being a Jew. In the Memoirs, for instance, he recounts a story of Bishop Hare, whose edition of the Hebrew Psalter Psalmanazar so much hated and wanted to replace. W hen Hare was told that the author of the history of the Jews in the Universal History, whose name was Psalmanazar, was intending to publish a new and competing version of the Psalms, he replied that “there was never a Jew of them all that understood any thing of Hebrew, much less of the sacred poetry.” Psalmanazar reviled the bishop for his prejudice as well as his schol­ arship and promptly mocked him by sarcastically noting that “a Jew would as soon call a son of his Beelzebub, as Salmanazar, or Nabuchadnezzar” (Mem 357-59). Similarly, John Richardson’s Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations (1778), originally prefixed to his Persian, Arabic, and English dictionary, contained a short digression on literary forgeries that included “the History of Formosa by the Jew Psalmanazar.” Yet Richardson also praised Psalmanazar’s invented Formosan language, which he called “sufficiently original, copious, and regular to impose upon men of very extensive learning.”49 In a certain way, then, Psalmanazar’s Jewishness was not just a function of his strangesounding name but also of his “native” fluency in the “languages, literature, and manners of Eastern Nations,” whether Hebrew or “Formosan.”50 One late-nineteenth-century reader even returned to the subject by arguing that since Psalmanazar’s proficiency in Hebrew was “apparently beyond the standard of a lad in a Jesuit college,” there was “therefore a possibility that he was a Jew, trained as a boy in a Talmud Torah school, where he got his Greek.” In fact Psalmanazar knew very little Greek, as he himself confessed (Mem 128), but such a wild reading is also a very belated example of a much broader tendency to ensure that the impostor’s “true” identity remained thoroughly outlandish: as the same reader concluded, perhaps Psalmanazar “is to be transliterated Solomon Manasseh or Solomon Asher.”51 “The Jew Psalmanazar” thus remains a strangely resonant phrase, not merely because of the profound irony that the impostor

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had transferred his attention from a fake Formosan culture to an authentic Hebrew one, or that his construction of a history of Formosa eventually led to an even more carefully constructed history of the Jews.52 For his contemporaries’ desire to place him as a Jew is also a final ironic example of the Great Wall of Europe in action, since even if he wasn’t really Formosan at all he was still a foreigner as far as the English were concerned, and while he may not have been a wandering Jew in point of fact, he still maintained a “Jewish” name and imposed upon himself a permanently alien oth­ erness in which he could feel that his punishment as a hack writer was (like the wandering Jew?) somehow deserved. When Thomas Birch encountered Psalmanazar in 1741, now more than sixty and applying for a job as an index maker, Birch, too, realized the irony in the fact that “the renowned Psalmonazar, the pretended Prince of Formosa” had been condemned “by a fate not unlike that of Dionysius . . . to a punishment severe enough for an Impostor or a Tyrant. Omnes paenarum facies hie labor unicus habet.,,n This single task, in other words, contains every kind of punishment. It is thus also somehow fitting that Psalmanazar had revealed so little about the second half of his life in his Memoirs, since there is a sense in which he had no identity to “go back to” once he was no longer widely believed to be Formosan, or at least once he was no longer so much in the public spotlight. His regularity was not only a way of life but a way of life by which he had operated all along, and by which, chiefly through his lifelong interest in languages, both real and imaginary, he was able successfully to construct and defend a Formosan identity and then a “Jewish” one. This regularity was able to endow him with a series of identi­ ties, even if the final one was paradoxically unidentifiable or anony­ mous: the name Psalmanazar but nothing more, or rather the name Psalmanazar as he had fashioned it himself, the regular man (with­ out a name, a nation) that he had finally managed to become. W hat difference did it make where he was really from? W hether or not any of his identity claims had corresponded with objective or scientific facts, or whether his version of Formosa had corre­ sponded with the island at it was described by a long line of traders, travelers, and missionaries, Psalmanazar’s regularity always ensured that he remained a man from somewhere else—that he remained, as the English often put it, a stranger. That particular Great Wall he would never he able to cross.

Afterword

Anima Fuerte

In November 1579, exactly two-thirds into his celebrated circum­ navigation of the world, Sir Francis Drake dropped anchor at the island of Ternate, the most important and powerful of the Spice Islands or Moluccas, a region in eastern Indonesia today known as the Maluku. The point of the visit (and, perhaps, of the entire threeyear voyage) was to negotiate with the Ternatean sultan for an English monopoly in the clove trade.1Once an agreement had been reached, and six tons of cloves had been loaded onto the ship,2 a visitor came aboard to see the captain: “a goodly gentleman” he was, “very well accompanied with his interpreter.” “He was apparelled much after our manner, most neate and Courtlike: his carriage the most respective, and full of discreet behaviour that ever we had seene.” He introduced himself as a native of China, of the province of Paghia, gave his name as Pausaos and said that he was a member of the royal family of Hombu. He had been wrongfully accused of a capital crime, he confessed, but rather than face execution at home he convinced the emperor (whose name was Bonog) to send him into exile instead, never to return unless he could bring back “some worthy intelligence, such as his Majestie had never had before, and were most fit to be knowne, and most honorable for China.”Pausaos asked Drake many questions, thereby hoping “to learne some such intelligence as might make way for his returne into his countrey.” Drake replied at some length, as “the stranger hearkened with great attention and delight.” Finally, he begged Drake to return with him to China, briefly expostulating on the glories of “one of the most ancient, mightiest and richest kingdomes in the world.” But Drake in ;

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politely refused, “and so the stranger parted sorrie that he could not prevaile in his request, yet exceeding glad of the intelligence he had learned.”3 Two full-length accounts of Drake’s voyage were published by the early seventeenth century, and although both of them con­ tained detailed—and often identical—accounts of the pomp and circumstance of Drake’s meeting with the Ternatean leader, only one of them included this equally colorful story of the Chinese visitor. This was the version published in 1628 as The World Encompassed, “carefully collected” from notes made by the ship’s chaplain, Francis Fletcher, and edited by Drake’s nephew. It was supposed to supercede the earlier anonymous account included in both Richard Hakluyt’s and Samuel Purchas’s large compilations of English voyage chronicles published in 1589, 1600, and 1625. I don’t want to go into any detailed analysis of the comparative veracity of these versions or of their connection to other source materials that have also survived.5 I want to point out merely that there are a number of things about Pausaos’s story that might strike us as odd. We will leave aside for the moment the occasionally unChinese-sounding names that Fletcher’s account provides, since it is a common enough trait of premodern travelogues that proper names and foreign vocabulary get mangled in the translation. Yet it might seem surprising to read that an emperor of China would have allowed anyone, even (or perhaps especially) a member of his own family, to be permitted to leave the country in this way, rather than face execution or the centuries-old practice of intérnal exile. And given Chinese distrust and disdain for the outside world in general during this period, it is even harder to imagine any foreign news being judged as “most fit to be knowne” and “most honorable for China.”6 One might also wonder why Drake should have refused Pausaos’s seemingly gracious invitation, since had it not been the aspiration of European seafarers for hundreds of years, from Marco Polo onward, to be offered such direct and easy access to the court of the emperor of Cathay and its legendary riches? Had Drake refused because he was anxious to return home, espe­ cially since his main objective had now been accomplished and his vessel’s hold was positively bursting with cloves? O r had Fletcher (or Drake’s nephew) simply misrepresented or misunderstood what had actually occurred?

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We will never know. Certainly Drake was uncomfortable during his stay at Ternate, owing not merely to anxieties over the sorry state of his ship and the number of men he had already lost, but also to the fact that the region was closely monitored by the Portuguese, who had controlled both the neighboring island of Tidore and—up until the time of Drake’s visit—the trade in cloves. Drake’s presence, in fact, became notorious in the Spanishand Portuguese-speaking world; if in England he was a national hero, in Spain and Portugal he was nothing more than a pirate.7 The negotiations with the Ternatean sultan, for instance, were evi­ dently not as straightforward or cordial as the English accounts claimed. According to Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’s Conquista de las Islas Malacas (1609), Drake had at first attempted to secure cloves without paying export duty, and was thereupon ordered to be put to death. Drake, however, “an expert in fraud, to whose ingenuity the arts of dissimulation were not new,” finally managed to extricate himself.8 Moreover, in 1580 (just one year after Drake’s visit), Philip II of Spain succeeded to the Portuguese throne, and upon his ascension he was understandably worried about how Portuguese possessions in the East Indies would react to the news that they had been absorbed by the Spanish crown. A spy was thus sent to the region, one Francisco de Duenas, and his report contains a number of uncomplimentary stories about the English captain that are often at odds with the English accounts.9 Is it possible, then, that Pausaos was also a (non-Chinese) spy, as perhaps his repeated requests for “intelligence” might indicate? Could this explain the apparent implausibility of his picturesque story or even Drake’s refusal to accompany him? Authorities on Drake have sometimes wondered about the veracity of Fletcher’s story, but no one seems to have doubted Pausaos’s Chinese identity. The standard nineteenth-century edi­ tion of The World Encompassed (as well as more recent reprints) suggests modern equivalents for one or two of the text’s Chinese terms.10 Other commentators cautiously refer to the episode as “a quaint tale” or “an odd and improbable incident,” and a recent treatment of the voyage argues that Drake simply wanted to return home as soon as possible and that “this is undoubtedly why he did not accept the Chinaman’s offer.”11 But there is also a tantalizing piece of evidence in Argensola’s text that has been largely ignored, namely, that Duenas was sent to Ternate disguised as Chinese! As

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the 1708 English translation put it very simply, “he set out in the Habit of a Chinese.”'1 I do not suggest that Pausaos and Duenas must have been one and the same. In the first place, Duenas was not sent out to investigate the situation until two years after Drake had left. He probably did not actually visit Ternate either, and he may not even have been disguised as Chinese until a second mis­ sion later in the same year.13 Yet it does seem to me possible that Pausaos, like Duenas soon thereafter and Psalmanazar more than a century later, was also a fake Asian. At the same time, however, I would also like to argue that Pausaos’s real identity—much like Psalmanazar’s—is not even the most significant aspect of his story. This, too, has much to tell us about Psalmanazar’s Formosan guise. For Fletcher’s presentation is also a perfect example of the Great Wall of Europe, and not simply because Fletcher or Drake himself may have been unable to detect an Iberian face beneath the Chinese habit. For even if Pausaos was Chinese there is an important and entirely typical way in which he is presented to English readers by means of numerous preexisting clichés about China and Chinese people. He is first introduced according to a stereotype of an exotic East Indian nobleman, if not specifically a Confucian mandarin: the “goodly gentleman . . . most neate and Courtlike,” whose “carriage” was “the most respective, and full of discreet behaviour that ever we had seene.” O r as Samuel Johnson paraphrased it more than a century later in his life of Drake, Pausaos “soon distinguished himself from the natives of Ternate, or any other country that [Drake and his men] had seen, by his civility and apprehension.”14 These conventionalized ideas are further developed as “the stranger hearkened with great atten­ tion and delight to [Drake’s] discourse.” “He naturally excelled in memory,” we are told, “(besides his helpe of art to better the same) so he firmely printed [everything] in his mind, and with great rev­ erence thanked God, who had so unexpectedly brought him to the notice of such admirable things.”15While such natural and artificial mnemonic talent may not be a familiar part of the early modern Chinese stereotype (it reminds us more of Western models of memory training much in vogue during the Renaissance), /it nonetheless certainly befits a generalized picture of an Eastern sage.16 In any event, was the stranger’s obvious “attention and delight” due to his antipodal foreignness or to the fact that he was not what he seemed?

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Second, we are also supplied with an utterly hackneyed précis of “the number and greatnesse of the Provinces [of China], with the rare commodities and good things they yeelded: the number, statelinesse, and riches of their Cities, with what abundance of men, vict­ uals, munition, and all manner of necessaries and delightfull things they were stored with.” Pausaos’s self-identification as a native of the province of Paghia (the “metropolitan province” of Peiking), as well as a later reference to Beijing as “Suntien (by some called Quinzai) which is the chiefest Citie of all China,” could have been lifted out of any one of a number of popular travelogues and early descrip­ tions, where these same names are routinely given, indeed some­ times in a single sentence.17 Quinzai (Hangzhou) originates with Marco Polo. W hat seems to have impressed the narrator most of all, however, was the fact that in China they had “ordnance and great gunnes . . . above 2000 yeares ago,” and “so perfectly made that they would hit a shilling.”18 Again, is Fletcher recording what was most appealing to him (or to Drake), or has Pausaos simply been feeding them with precisely the kind of stereotypical information about the mysterious Middle Kingdom and its fabled antiquity that would have had the greatest effect?19 In the preceding chapters we have seen many parallel instances of the way Psalmanazar was able to play on the expectations of his audience in order to be “Formosan.” Duenas’s imposture, too, must have operated along similar lines, even if he was pretending to be Chinese in Asia (but not in China) rather than exclusively among Europeans. According to Argensola, his disguise was adapted to the region with great specificity: he was not only dressed “in the Habit of a Chinese” but also “much assisted by his Knowledge of those Countries, and their Languages”—languages that did not necessari­ ly include any form of Chinese. Third, he “travell’d about the Islands, like a Sangley, or Chinese, in thejanguas, or trading Vessels of the Malay, and Philippine Merchants.”20Sangley was the term used to delineate ethnic Chinese in the Philippines,21 and the OED defines a jangada as a raftlike boat commonly used in the East Indies. Thus Duenas was clever enough to pass among the islands as precisely the kind of (Spanish-speaking? Malay-speaking?) Chinese that the situation required. As for Pausaos, whatever his real nationality may have been, die idea of China and of Chinese people had to be similarly adapted—either by Pausaos himself or by Fletcher or Fletcher’s editors, In other words, even if Pausaos was exaedy what

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he claimed to be, and we cannot rule out this possibility entirely, it would still be necessary for his “Chineseness” to be translated into preconceived terms in order to be understood at all. W hen Pausaos is described as being “apparelled much after our manner,” for instance, does this mean that he wore European-style clothing or just not the kind of robes that Fletcher would have expected of the proverbial mandarin? Might this relative familiarity, in fact, have helped to make him even more convincing, or at least less threaten­ ing? And Psalmanazar? Wasn’t he, too, preferable to an actual Formosan? According to Argensola, Duenas’s spy mission “was much assisted” not only “by his Knowledge of those Countries, and their Languages” but “much more by his bold Spirit \anima fuerte\, sufficiently try’d in those Wars.”22 Psalmanazar, coincidentally enough, was also once accused of being a spy during his early trav­ els in Germany, when he had first begun to claim that he was a Japanese convert to Christianity (Mem 144). But if Duenas, like Psalmanazar, was able to establish an Asian identity to the satisfac­ tion of his interlocutors, it was because of an “impersonasian” based on matters such as dress, speech, and comportment. The fact that he was white would never have stood in the way. Psalmanazar also had fair skin, had never traveled east of Germany, and didn’t even know anything about the real island until his own Description of Formosa had been substantially completed. But these facts were much less meaningful than that his fake language and his anima fiierte were nothing short of extraordinary.

Notes

Introduction 1. Mémoires pour Vhistoire des sciences et des beaux arts [aka Mémoires de Tre'voux] (April 1705): 589. 2. There is a modern reprint of the first English edition, ed. N. M. Penzer (London: Robert Holden, 1926). We are sorely in need of an updat­ ed, annotated text that takes into account the numerous changes Psalmanazar made for the second edition, as well as the numerous variants in the French edition. 3. There was also a second edition published the following year; the text is the same but has been completely reset. 4. Innes’s later career is recounted in Mem 180; in the Monthly Review 31 (December 1764): 445-46; and in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934-64), 1:359. 5. Assuming that he was born in 1679, the date given in his will. Elsewhere, however, he claims to have been even younger: the Memoirs (219) asserts he was between nineteen and twenty when he wrote the first edition of the Description—-that is, in 1703-d—and that he was forced, “by Dr. Innes’s advice, to assume three years more than I had.” 6 . Transcripts of the society’s unpublished papers are cited in Frederic J. Foley, The Great Formosan Impostor (St. Louis: St. Louis University; Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute; Taipei: Mei-Ya Publications, 1968), 20. There is also a surviving letter from John Chamberlayne to Isaac Newton on 2 February 1703/4, in which Chamberlayne mentions that he “engaged Mr George & am to carry him [to the meeting] in my Coach, but without telling him the Reason.” The letter begins, “I suppose you have not forgot the Famous Conference appointed to be this day at Gresham College between Mr George the Formosan . . . & le Pere Fontanaye a Jesuite lately come from China” (Isaac Newton, Correspondence, ed. H. W. Turnbull, 7 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959-77], 4:670). 7. But this was by no means certain; see for example a letter from 1704 from Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed to James Pound: “the Main Argumt was because [Psalmanazar] affirmed formosa to be under ye Jurisdiction of ye Japoncse where lie (the Jesuit) affirmed it under the

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Emperor of China.” “Pray enquire,” the letter continues, “under which it is & informe us as also what more you can learn of yt country for we are here in the dark about it” (Newton, Correspondence, 4:425). 8 . The question of Psalmanazar’s “Caucasian” appearance is the sub­ ject of chapter 2 . 9. Publication of the new edition was announced in the London Gazette for 28 June-2 July 1705. 10. G. P----- m----- r, A Dialogue between a Japanese and a Formosan, about Some Points of the Religion of the Tjme (London, 1707) [repr. in William Campbell, The Articles of Christian Instruction in Favorlang-Formosan, Dutch, and English, from Vertrecht’s Manuscript of 1650 (London: Kegan Paul, 1896), 103-21]; An Enquiry into the Objections against George Psalmanaazaar of Formosa, in which the Accounts of the People, and Language of Formosa by Candidius, and the Other European Authors. . . Are Proved Not to Contradict His Accounts (London [1707]). Publication of the Enquiry was announced in the Daily Courant for 18 July. 11. Isaac d’Amalvi, Eclaircissemens [tic] necessaires pour bien entendre ce que le Sr N.F.D.B.R. dit etre arrivé a I’Ecluse en Flandres, par rapport a la con­ version de Mr. George Psalmanaazaar, Japonais, dans son livre intitulé, “'Description de Pisle Formosa''’ (The Hague, 1706); Psalmanazar’s reply, L’Eclercisseur Eclercy; or, An Answer to a Book Entituled “Eclercissements sur ce que, ifc.” by Isaack D ’Amalvy (London [1707]), is printed with continuous pagination following the Enquiry. 12. “On the first day of April will be performed at the Play-house in the Hay-market an Opera call’d The Cruelty ofAtreus. N.B. The Scene where­ in Thyestes eats his own Children, is to be performed by the famous Mr Psalmanazar, lately arrived from Formosa: The whole Supper being set to Kettle-drums” {The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 1:65). 13. A number of issues of the British Apollo in late 1708 and early 1709 (new style) carried advertisements of a “fine white Enamell’d Work, as it is improved according to the right Japan way, by Geo Psalmonaazaar.” The first of these ads appeared on 17-22 December 1708. 14. Samuel Palmer, The General History of Printing, from Its First Invention in the City of Mentz, to Its First Progress and Propagation Thro’ the Most Celebrated Cities in Europe (London, 1732); An Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present, folio ed., 23 vols. (London, 1736-65). On the publication history of this massive work, see Guido Abbattista, “The Business of Paternoster Row: Towards a Publishing History of the Universal History (1736-65),” Publishing History 17 (1985): 5-50; and Giuseppe Ricuperati, “ Universal History: Storia di un progetto europeo. Impostori, storici ed editori nella Ancient Part,” Studi settecenteschi 2 (1981): 7-90. 15. The proposed chapter for a sequel to Pamela is reprinted in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 107-17; Emanuel Bowen, CoTnplete System of Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1747). 16. Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 3:314., > 17. Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson (1787), cited in

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Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 3:443. 18. Jonathan Swift, Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-68), 12:113-14. Swift’s text is also very frequently antholo­ gized. The Psalmanazar passage in Smollett is cited in Boswell, Life of Johnson, 3:443, and the relevant extracts from Pylades and Corinna, by Richard Gwinnet and Elizabeth Thomas, are given in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 118-24. The Pylades and Corinna piece (slightly abridged) was also reprinted after Psalmanazar’s death in the Gentleman’s Magazine 35 (February 1765): 78-81, owing to the fact that “the account of his life has again rendered it the object of publick curiosity” (78). 19. Essays on the Following Subjects: I. On the Reality and Evidence of Miracles. . . (London, 1753). 20. The most influential treatment (despite some inaccuracies) is Sidney Lee’s entry for the Dictionary ofNational Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921-22), 16:439-42. This is currently being updated by Robert DeMaria for the new DNB (forth­ coming), who was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his entry. 21. Three recent examples are: Joseph Rosenblum, Practice to Deceive: The Amazing Stories of Literary Forgery’s Most Notorious Practitioners (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 1-17; Paul Collins, Barnard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck (New York: Picador, 2001), 126-54; and Ben Downing, “Psalmanazar the Amazing,” Yale Review 90 (2002): 46-74. See also Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002). 22. William Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker (1826) (London: Everyman, 1928), 198; Vita Sackville-West, “The Wit and the Wanderer,” Nation and Athenaeum, 16 June 1928, 358-59; Ernest Hemingway, “Our Modern Amateur Impostors,” in Dateline Toronto: The Complete “Toronto Star” Dispatches, 1920-1924, ed. William White (New York: Scribner, 1985), 445-49. The views of Johnson and Leibniz are discussed in subsequent chap­ ters. 23. Rodney Needham, Exemplars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 75-116, 229-40; Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31-65; Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1995), 171-207; Tzetvan Todorov, The Morals ofHistory, trans. Alyson Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 87-118; Frank Lestringant, “Travels in Eucharista: Formosa and Ireland from George Psalmanaazaar to Jonathan Swift,” trans. Noah Guynn, Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 109-25; and Robert Adams Day, “Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa’ and the British Reader (including Samuel Johnson),” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 197-221.

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24. Richard M. Swiderski, The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991). 25. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 26. David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989); Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modem Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modem Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 27. Homi Bhabha has been the most influential here, showing the way that the “proliferating difference” of those who were colonized actually necessitated a “repeated hesitancy . . . when [colonialist discourse] contem­ plates its discriminated subjects: the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeak­ able rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots. It is not that the voice of authority is at a loss for words. It is, rather, that the colonial discourse has reached that point when, faced with the hybridity of its objects, the presence of power is revealed as something other than what its rules of recognition assert” (The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 112). 28. I have taken the term imperial gaze from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Roudedge, 1992). 29. The standard study remains Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). See also the conclusion of Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery,” 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 2:255-58, which argues that the idea of blackness long preceded any actual encounters with Africans and continued to influence the way that “racial” representations were made. An excellent case study is Linda E. Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early-Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001). 30. See Pratt’s discussion of autoethnography, a term used to describe “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (Imperial Eyes, 7). 31. Jean Baptiste Du Halde, The General History of China, 4 vols. (London, 1736), 1:171

Chapter 1 1. The best summary of then available information about Lormosa appears in Donald E Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1965-93), 3:1797—1824. 2. C. E. S., ‘t Verwaerloosdc Formosa (Amsterdam, 1675). An English

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translation appears in William Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch: Described from Contemporary Records (London: Kegan Paul, 1903), 383-459, and as Neglected Formosa, ed. Inez de Beauclair (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975). See also C. R. Boxer, “The Siege of Fort Zeelandia and the Capture of Formosa from the Dutch, 1661-1662,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society of London 24 (1927): 16-47. 3. See Derek Massarella, “Chinese, Tartars, and ‘Thea’; or, A Tale of Two Companies: The English East India Company and Taiwan in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3d ser., 3 (1993): 393-426; and The English Factory in Taiwan: 1670-1685, ed. Hsiu-Jung Chang et al. (Taipei: National Taiwan University, 1995). 4. George Candidius, “Discours ende cort verhael van ‘t eylant Formosa,” in Begin ende voortgangh der Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnit, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1645-46). The volumes aren’t continuously paginated, but Candidius’s account appears in volume 2, on pages 55-71 of the Joumael ende Verhael van de . . . Oost-Indische reyse ghedaen by Seyger de Rechteren. More conveniently accessible editions of the text can be found in the Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude hollandsche zending, ed. J. A. Grothe, 6 vols. (Utrecht: Bentum, 1884-91), 3:1-35; and in The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society, a Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources, ed. Leonard Blussé et al. (Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 1999), 91-133, which also includes an English translation. Candidius’s report is also translated in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 9-25. 5. George Candidius, “A Short Account of the Island of Formosa in the Indies,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, 4 vols. (London, 1704), 1:526-33. In the Term Catalogues, 1668-1709 A.D., ed. Edward Arber, 3 vols. (London: privately printed, 1903-06), 3:368, 387-88, Churchill’s two volumes are mentioned as being printed in December 1703 and February 1704 (new style), respectively. The first volume was also announced in the London Gazette of 11-15 November 1703. Publication of the first edition of the Description was announced in the London Gazette of 17-20 April 1704, in the Daily Courant for 24 April, 1 May, 12 May, and 19 May, and in The Post-Man for 15-18, 18-20, and 20-22 April. 6 . Arnoldus Montanus, Atlas Japannensis, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1670); Arnoldus Montanus [actually Olfert Dapper], Atlas Chinensis, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1671). Although both texts appeared in English under Montanus’s name, he and Dapper were collaborators, and the Atlas Chinensis appeared in Dutch as by Dapper. Ogilby also printed, among other travel books, the companion volumes America (London, 1670) and Africa (London, 1670). All are profusely illustrated. 7. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 9-202. 8 . Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, Voyages and Travels . . . into the East-Indies (London, 1662); Jean Baptiste Tavernier, A Collection of Several Relations and Treatises Singular and Curious. . . Not Printed among His First Six Voyages (London, 1680), • 9. Hiob Ludolf et al., Allgemeinc Schau-Biihne der Welt, 5 vols.

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(Frankfurt, 1699-1731), 3:1345-48. 10. On this issue see Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), esp. 162-85. 11. Candidius’s report follows much briefer notes by Pieter Nuyts, governor of Formosa from 1627 to 1629, which unlike Candidius’s account had also been previously published in editions of van Rechteren’s journal in 1635 and 1639: see Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3:453; P. A. Tiele, Mémoire hihliographique sur les journaux des navigateurs néerlandais (Amsterdam: Muller, 1867), 250-53; C. Imbault-Huart, L’ile Formose: Histoire et description (Paris: Leroux, 1893), xxxiv-xxxvi, which is an expansion of Flenri Cordier’s classic Bibliotheca sinica: Dictionnaire hihliographique des ouvrages relatifs a I’empire chinois, 2d ed., 5 vols. (Paris: Guilmoto, 1904-24), 1:260-96. 12. H. J. J. Brouwer, Die fiinjf und zweintzigste Schijffahrt nach dem Königreich Chili in West-Indien . .. , sambt einer Beschreibung der zweyen Insulen Formosa undJapan (Frankfurt, 1649), 33-46. There is also a Dutch edition of Brouwer (Journal ende Historis verhael van de Reyse gedaen by Oosten [Amsterdam, 1646]), which does not, however, include Candidius’s narrative. 13. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 9. 14. Candidius, “Short Account,” 1:526. 15. Bernardus Varenius, Descriptio regni Japoniae (Amsterdam, 1649). Japanese religion was treated in a separate volume published in the same year: Tractatus, in quo agitur de Japaniorum religione (Amsterdam, 1649); the latter is also cited in the Enquiry (39). 16. Francois Caron and Joost Schouten, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms ofJapan and Siam, ed. C. R. Boxer (London, 1663; London: Argonaut Press, 1935). 17. Candidius, “Short Account,” 1:531. 18. It is also mentioned in the preface to the French edition (DF Fr xxviii). 19. John Harris, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, 2 vols. (London, 1705), appendix to vol. 2, p. 40. By the third edition (London, 1764), the reference to Formosa is omitted entirely. 20. Robert Millar, The History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow ofPaganism, 3d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1731), 2:178. Millar is also mentioned in a 1759 letter to Smollett as having met Psalmanazar on the subject of the ongoing publication of the Universal History (see Smollett, Miscellaneous Works, ed. Robert Anderson, 6 th ed., 6 vols. [Edinburgh, 1820], 1:176). 21. Indeed, for centuries Candidius’s report has remained some­ thing of an embarrassment. Who could believe that mothers were forced to abort their children until the age of thirty-six? The story was sometimes taken at face value in comparative theoretical compilations, such as Thomas Salmon’s Critical Essay concerning Marriage (London, 1724), 300-301, as well as Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1750) and Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1810). Somewhat ironically, however, both Montesquieu and Malthus understood the detail as a way for the Formosans to prevent over­ population (see John Robert Shepherd, Marriage and Mandatory Abortion

Siraya [Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Association, 1995], 8-11). Campbell’s standard work on the Dutch in Formosa also seemed to accept it (Formosa under the Dutch, 543). But most modern readers have been quick to register their suspicions, and in Psalmanazar criticism one frequently comes across passing references to Candidius’s “obvious absurdities” or “flights of fancy” (for example, Frederic J. Foley, The Great Formosan Impostor [St. Louis: St. Louis University; Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute; Taipei: Mei-Ya Publications, 1968], 55; Robert Adams Day, “Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa’ and the British Reader (including Samuel Johnson),” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990], 207; Frank Lestringant, “Travels in Eucharista: Formosa and Ireland from George Psalmanaazaar to Jonathan Swift,” trans. Noah Guynn, Yale French Studies 86 [1994]: 114). For help on this point I am grateful to John Shufelt, “Appropriating Formosa: Two Eighteenth-Century European Accounts of Taiwan,” Studies in English Literature and Linguistics (National Taiwan Normal University) 24 (1998): 271. The latest ethnographic studies of the tribe that Candidius appears to be describing, however, have demonstrated that children might well have been aborted while their fathers were still of fighting age, which would have ended only when they had reached their mid­ thirties, since the birth of children was seen as a sign of weakness (see John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy of the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 65-66). A report preserved in the archives of the Dutch at Batavia similarly remarks that wives don’t bear children until the men are in their mid-thirties (Dagh-Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia vant passerende daer ter plaetse als over geheel Nederlandts-India, ed. J. E. Heeres et al., 24 vols. [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1896-1931], 1:24). See also Leonard Blussé and Marius P. H. Roessingh, “A Visit to the Past: Soulang, A Formosan Village Anno 1623,” Archipel 27 (1984): 69-71. Abortions are also mentioned in the archives of the Dutch fort at Formosa, but no details are given (Dagregisters van het kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan 1629-1662, ed. Leonard Blussé et al., 4 vols. [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1986-2000], 1:404). We should also note that modern anthropological stud­ ies rely almost entirely on the Dutch sources as well, since the tribe Candidius is describing had died out by the time Europeans returned to Formosa in the mid-nineteenth century (Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 557). 22. Richard M. Swiderski, The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991), 44. 23. Emanuel Bowen, Complete System of Geography, 2 vols. (London, 1747), 2:251. : 24. An Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present, folio ed., 23 vols. (London, 1736-65), modern part, 3:536 n. 539. For Dutch activities in the Far East in general, see the modern part, 4:407-546. These texts, both of which date from the 1750s, may have also been com­ posed by Psalmanazar himself. The Memoirs is of little help here, since it only provides a list of' sections written by Psalmanazar for the ancient part among the Seventeenth-Century

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(321-22), and Psalmanazar discusses the volumes covering modern history only in the very last pages, where “China, Japan, &c.” are included among “the number of empires and kingdoms which had not so much been touched upon in the Ancient part” (363). This sentence seems to have been written ca. 1752 and remained unrevised at the time of Psalmanazar’s death eleven years later. 25. Universal History, octavo ed., 60 vols. (London, 1779-84), mod­ ern part, 7:80. According to Day (“Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa,’” 209), this later version dates from 1768, five years affer Psalmanazar’s death. A similar pat­ tern of revision can be seen in the French editions (Histoire universelle depuis le commencement du monde jusqu’a présent, 46 vols. [Amsterdam, 1747-1802], 20:40; Histoire universelle, 125 vols. [Paris, 1779-91], 53:187). There is also a Dutch edition (Algemeene Historie, 47 vols. [Utrecht, 1736-87], with the modern part published as Hedendaagsche historie, ofhet vervolg van de algemeene historie, 17 vols. [Leiden, 1760-86]), where Psalmanazar is still mentioned (8:79-80). A German edition also exists but has not been consulted (Algemeine Welthistorie, 72 vols. [Halle, 1744-1810]). 26. The preface to the first edition had already mentioned someone who had actually been to Tyowan who corroborated the fact that “it is an Island somewhat remote and distinct from ours” (DF1 viii). 27. The preface to the German translation compares peasants of the Schwartzwald with sophisticated city dwellers (DF Germ 3). 28. Jean Baptiste Du Flalde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de Pempire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, 4 vols. (Paris, 1735), 1:161-70. 29. For instance, while Psalmanazar referred to the Dutch fort as Tyowan (DF1 148; DF2 4-5), the German translator gives its correct name: Zeelandia (DF Germ 267). The German translator also cites classical GrecoRoman material to validate Formosan customs, such as their prohibition against incest and husbands’ absolute power over their wives (DF Germ 296, 355-56). 30. One might argue that Psalmanazar was responsible for the German translation as well, or that the translator is purposely contributing to Psalmanazar’s apparently lingering mythic status, but there is no real evi­ dence for this. The translator also remarks that “Prof. Nicolai zu Tubingen” was interested in having Psalmanazar’s text translated, but that he had died before the project could be completed (sig. X8-X 8r). The reference is to Johann Nicolai (1665-1708), author of a number of works on Latin, Hebrew, and Egyptian customs and languages. 31. G. Boucher de la Richarderie, Bibliothéque universelle des voyages, 6 vols. (Paris, 1808), 5:290. Ridicule was immediate, as in John Pinkerton, A General Collection of Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, 17 vols. (London, 1808-14), 17:154. One should note that the spelling of Psalmanazar’s given name regularly changed depending on the language involved: the German Description calls him Georg, the Dutch uses Georgius, French commentators refer to him as Georges, and so on. Moreover, all edi­ tions and translations of the Description, as well as the Enquiryi spell his sur­

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: 33

name as Psalmanaazaar, but by the time of the publication of the Memoirs the spelling had been simplified. This, too, has sometimes led to confusion in library catalogues. 32. Tellingly, in 1790 another forger could use the unknown eastern half of the island to stage part of his own fictionalized travels (see Mauritius Augustus Benyowsky, Memoirs and Travels, ed. S. Pasfield Oliver [London: Kegan Paul, 1904], esp. 396-436). 33. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (November 1704): 514. 34. History of the Works of the Learned 8 (September 1706): 516. 35. Johann Albertus Fabricius, Salutaris lux evangelii toti orhiper div­ inam gratiam exoriens (Hamburg, 1731), 681-84, 698. 36. Johan Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollstandiges Universal-Lexicon alter Wissenschafften und Kunste, 64 vols. (Halle, 1732-50), 9:1497-98. Psalmanazar is also given a separate entry (29:1069). 37. Thomas Astley, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (London, 1745-47), 4:35, 36 n. b, 38 n. b. Astley’s text also appeared in French: Abbe Prévost, Histoire général des voyages, 64 vols. (Paris, 1746-89), 21:152-74, and in German:Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, 21 vols. (Leipzig, 1747-74), 6:62-71. 38. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, new ed., ed. C. S. Sonnini, 127 vols. (Paris, 1799-1808), 20:160-66, in a chapter on the “Variétés dans l’espece humaine,” first published around 1750; Andre Guillaume Contant d’Orville, Histoire des dijférens peuples du monde, 6 vols. (Paris, 1770-71), 1:184, 191. 39. The chapter on Formosan food was completely reworked to highlight the eating of human flesh (DF1 263-64; DF2 112-14). See esp. DF2 73: “if England be truly call’d the Paradise of Women, Formosa may justly be nam’d the Paradise ofMen and Hell of Women.” As a matter of fact, the very first mention of cannibalism occurs in the context of the enslavement of women: a man may execute one of his wives by ripping her heart from her breast and eating it before her relatives (DF2 72)! In the Memoirs Psalmanazar remarks that he quickly became “a great favorite” of “the fair sex . . . , even persons of fortune and character of sense, wit, and learning” (231-32). 40. Justin Stagl argues that the first edition’s placement of Psalmanazar’s story before the description of Formosa proper is “caused by an unauthorized (and wrong) decision by the editor or publisher” and “is contradicted by the whole conception of the book as well as by its title” (A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 [Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1995], 175 n. 5). There seems to me litde basis for this claim, which underestimates the appeal of detailed theological discussion for con­ temporary readers. In Psalmanazar’s second edition it was simply forgotten to change the title page to reflect the fact that the “preface in Vindication of himself’ is no longer “prefix’d” to the account of Formosa. And even in the Memoirs (144 n), Psalmanazar refers to “that fabulous account I gave of myself, prefixed to the history of Formosa.” 41. See Thomas I learne, Remarks and Collections, ed. C. E. Doble et

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al., 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885-1921), 1:17, for a note dated 28 July 1705: “tho’ there be a lid Edition of Psalmanezzer ye Formosan’s Book, giving an Account of his Country, &c. come out, wherein he has answered most of ye material objections made against him, yet I am told he is still taken to be a Cheat in London.” Hearne almost certainly met Psalmanazar while the impostor was at Oxford. 42. See Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 24, who cites a review men­ tioning the French text from September 1704. 43. In Psalmanazar’s response to Isaac d’Amalvi, Walloon minister at Sluis, the translator is “identified” as “Nicolas Francois du Bois Refiigie” (L’Eclercisseur Eclercy; or An Answer to a Book Entituled “Eclercissements sur ce que, &c. ” by Isaack D ’Amalvy [London (1707)], 60). An early review of the first English edition also mysteriously credits the translation to famed nonjuror and polemicist Charles Leslie (Nouvelles de la Re'publique des Lettres [July 1704]: 104), whom Psalmanazar also mentions as one of his acquaintances (Mem 203); and a review of the French edition refers to one N.A.F.D.V.N. (Mémoires pour Fhistoire des sciences et des beaux arts [aka Mémoires de Trevoux][April 1705]: 587-97). See also C. Sommervogel, Table me'thodique des Mémoires de Trévoux (1701-1775), 3 vols. (Paris, 1864—65), 3:173. Some crit­ ics have gone so far as to claim that Psalmanazar’s real name was N. F. B. de Rode (or de Rodes), an unexplained piece of guesswork achieved by arguing that the Father de Rode mentioned in the Description (the devious Jesuit who Psalmanazar says brought him to Europe) was the impostor’s own surname. This claim has been supported by an equally unexplained misreading of the N.F.D.B.R. on the title page of the Dutch edition (specifically) as N.F.B.D.R.—the last two initials standing for de Rode. See Johann Christoph Adelung, Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1806-17), 1:579 n; and Imbault-Huart, L’ile Formose, lvii, which cites Cordier. Despite Swiderski’s repeated claims that the Dutch edition reverses the two initials (False Formosan, 35 n. 6 , 250, 265), every copy of the text I have examined does not diverge from its French original in this fashion. 44. There is also an odd moment in Psalmanazar’s response to d’Amalvi (L’Eclercisseur Eclercy, 60), when he says that the minister had claimed that Innes was the real author of the Description. I can find no such claim in d’Amalvi’s text. 45. The French edition’s chapter 4, for instance, on Formosan reli­ gion, has combined chapters 4, 5, 6 , and 8 from the first English edition; and the French chapter 5, since it also concerns Formosan religion (specifically, their belief in the transmigration of souls), has been moved forward from its original position as chapter 13. Another seemingly small change, but which to me suggests more than anything else Psalmanazar’s hand in the composi­ tion of the French version, is that the chapter on language, which has been moved forward ten chapters (because of its popularity with early readers?), now includes the titles of the Apostle’s Creed and Ten Commandments trans­ lated into “Formosan” as well (DF Fr 143, 145). Even if, as we will see in chapter 3, Psalmanazar’s Formosan was essentially a do-it-yourself language in which anyone could participate, it is otherwise difficult to explain how anyone else could have provided these titles. Strangely, however, the French

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*35

text provides no specific examples of Formosan grammar, as in the English editions. 46. Despite its disapproval of the French text, the German edition still silently lifts a number of its details; examples include borrowed footnotes (DF Germ 31, 45), at least one chapter tide (chapter 16), and a plate (follow­ ing chapter 21) of a devil worshiped by the Formosans. 47. As Susan Stewart puts it, “there is no supply of answers without the demanding questions: the con man’s rule ‘give ’em what they want,’ became for Psalmanazar a way of structuring an imaginary social whole—its closure provided by the prior assumption of closure on the part of its audi­ ence” (Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 41). 48. Or, at least, as Lubomirski is made to report, that “the Island formerly belong’d to China, but now at this time belongs to the Japponese” (Enq 22). On Lubomirski’s fictional status see Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 40. 49. Transcriptions of the letters to Reynolds are reprinted in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 86-96, and Reynolds’s replies are given at 104—6. 50. Letter of 27 February 1706 (new style), cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 88-90. 51. Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 89 n. 5; Evert Ysbrantszoon Ides, Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-land to China . . . (London, 1706), 113-208. Publication was announced in the London Gazette for 1-5 November 1705. The original Dutch edition, which Psalmanazar also men­ tions in his letter (cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 89) is titled Driejaarige reize naar China, te lande gedaan door den Moskovischen afgezant (Amsterdam, 1704). The section by Kao appears at 139-243. 52. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 104. 53. A letter from Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed to Pound also refers to a copy of the Description having being sent out to him (Isaac Newton, Correspondence, ed. H. W. Turnbull, 7 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959—77], 4:425). See also Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 94 n. 10, for more information about Pound. I find the idea that Psalmana­ zar’s book may actually have been read in East Asia to be particularly fascinat­ ing54. Presumably Robert Junius’s now lost Soulat i A.B.C ka patutugogniang ta Alla lack i Christang tu guma guma (Delft, 1645); or perhaps an early edition of The Articles of Christian Instruction in Favorlang-Formosan, Dutch, and English, Jrom, Vertrecht’s Manuscript of 1650, ed. William Campbell (London: Kegan Paul, 1896); or even the original edition of Gravius’s “Formulary of Christianity” in the Siraya Language of Formosa: Facsimile Edition of the Original of 1662, ed. Erin Asai, Memoirs of the Faculty of Literature and Politics, Taihoku Imperial University [National Taiwan University] 4:1 (1939). Formosan languages will be the subject of chapter 3. 55. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 105-6. 56. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 94-95. 57. See nil early reviewer of the Description, who withheld judgment on the truth of Psalmanazar’s claims by remarking that “we cannot conceive

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how the Bp. of London, to whom he has dedicated this Piece, should give any Countenance to him, if there was the least Suspicion of his being a Cheat” (History of the Works of the Learned [April 1704]: 244-45). 58. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 96. 59. Recueil des voiages qui ont serve a Pétablissement et aux progres de la compagnie des Indes Orientales, forrnée dans lesprovinces-unies des Pais-has, 7 vols. (Amsterdam, 1702-7), 5:1-155. These volumes are a translation of the Begin ende voortgangh der Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oost-Indische Compagnie of 1645-46, and Candidius’s account appears at 5:74-108. 60. See esp. Robert Markley, “Violence and Profits on the Restoration Stage: Trade, Nationalism, and Insecurity in Dryden’s Amboyna,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 2-17. 61. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 359: “At the Royal Society and elsewhere [Psalmanazar] made a series of spectacular claims for his homeland-—claims that could not be assessed except on his own word, espe­ cially since the only man then in England who could pronounce on the real character of Formosan society was a Jesuit.” Johns also cites a contemporary letter from Flamsteed to Newton that notes that Psalmanazar “had a meet­ ing with Pere Fontenay at y R Society where ye Jesuit declared him (with ye usuall confidence of yt Order) to be an imposter” (Newton, Correspondence, 4:425). 62. Me'moires pour Phistoire des sciences et des beaux arts, (April 1705): 589: “Le P. de Fontaney a toújours évité de le confondre, pour le laisser vivre aux depens de ceux qui vouloient bien le croire.”

Chapter 2 1.

On ideas of race in the ancient world see Frank M. Snowden Jr.,

Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). For the medieval period see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 197-242. For the Renaissance and eighteenth century see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modem England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,”and Writing in the Early Modem Period (London: Routledge, 1994). The still standard study of early modem “anthropological” thinking is Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 2. Critical Review 18 (1764): 370. 3. The letter is dated 26 February 1704 (new style); see John Locke, Correspondence, ed. E. S. De Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-89), 8:216. - f 4. The society’s manuscripts relating to Psalmanazar are cited in Frederic J. Foley, The G reat Formosan Impostor (St. Louis: St. Louis

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University; Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute; Taipei: Mei-Ya Publications, 1968), 17-20. The flyleaf inscription is cited at 19 and reads in full (BL shelfmark 981.a.26): “This book contains in many particulars the most ingenious imposture on the Publick, but the whole was detected, & the Author brought to Shame by a very few Questions put to him by the very ingenious late Dr. Halley, who inquired concerning the duration of the Twilight & how long the Sun shone down the Chimneys every year in Formosa. His philosophy here failing him, he was detected never to have been in the Island.” Since Halley died in 1742 the note must have been written later than this date. 5. Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 20. 6 . Monthly Review 31 (December 1764): 447: “the opposition of [Drs. Halley, Mead, and Woodward] was generally imputed, not to the true cause, but to their supposed disregard for Christianity; the honour of which, some thought, was not a little concerned in this notable conversion. It was, therefore, the luckiest thing that could have happened for George, that the Free-thinkers were his first declared opposers.” See also Mem 196-97. 7. Examples of Chinese travelers to England, both real and fiction­ al, are given in William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951; New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 121-39. 8 . Jonathan D. Spence, “The Paris Years of Arcadio Huang,” in Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture (New York: Norton, 1992), 18. 9. Anthony a Wood, Life and Times, ed. Andrew Clark, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891-1900), 3:236. On Shen’s European journey see Theodore Nicholas Foss, “The European Sojourn of Philippe Couplet and Michael ShenFuzong, 1683-1692,” in Philippe Couplet, S.J. (1623-1693): The Man Who Brought China to Europe, ed. Jerome Heyndrickx (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1990), 121-42. 10. On Psalmanazar’s illustrations see Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 15-17; Peter Mason, “Ethnographic Portraiture in the Eighteenth Century: George Psalmanaazaar’s Drawings of Formosans,” EighteenthCentury Life 23 (1999): 58-76. 11. Mémoires pour Phistoire des sciences et des beaux arts [aka Mémoires de Tre'voux] (April 1705): 589; Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 17, 118. 12. As translated in William Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch: Describedfrom Contemporary Records (London: Kegan Paul, 1903), 9. For the original text, see George Candidius, “Discours ende cort verhael van ‘t eylant Formosa,” in Archief voor de geschiedenis der oude hollandsche zending, ed. J. A. Grothe, 6 vols. (Utrecht: Bentum, 1884-91), 3:2; and, more recently, The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa's Aboriginal Society, a Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources, ed. Leonard Blussé et al. (Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 1999), 92. 13. George Candidius, “A Short Account of the Island of Formosa in the Indies,” in A Collection o f Voyages arid Travels, ed. Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, 4 vols. (London, 1704), 1:527. * 14. Olfcrt Dapper G edenkwaerdig bedryf der Nederlandsche OostIndische mactscbappyc, op de kiis/c en in bet keizerrijk van Taising o f Sina

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(Amsterdam, 1670), 20. 15. Arnoldus Montanus [actually Olfert Dapper], Atlas Chinensis, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1671), 21; Jan Janszoon Strays, Voyages and Travels (London, 1684), cited in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 256. 16. The inhabitants also “use Distill’d Waters, not only to wash themselves, but also to remove any speck upon the skin . . . , and this is one means which makes them so fair” (DF1 222). The second edition added a footnote to the effect that “the Author will teach any one to make this beau­ tifying Wash” (DF2 78). 17. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965-93), 3:1619. See also Walter Demel, “Wie die Chinesen gelb wurden,” Historische Zeitschrift 255 (1992): 625-66. 18. Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassyfrom the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, Emperour of China (London, 1669), 208. 19. As noted in the travel journal ofJohn Saris (1613), cited in Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3:1850, 1852. Marco Polo, too, had described the Japanese as white. See also Joao Rodrigues’s Account of Sixteenth-Century Japan, ed. Michael Cooper (London: Hakluyt Society, 2001), 120 n. 1. 20. Jean Baptiste Du Halde, The General History of China, 4 vols. (London, 1736), 2:138. The original text is Description ge'ographique, historique, chronologique, politique, etphysique de Pempire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, 4 vols. (Paris, 1735), 2:80. 21. John Ogilby, Africa (London, 1670), 24. 22. See Hall, Things of Darkness, 44-61, 92-96; Lynda E. Boose, ‘“The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” in Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, 42-44; Thomas Browne, Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vols. (London, 1835-36; New York: AMS Press, 1968), 3:263-87. 23. On similar explanations in the medieval period see Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modem Studies 31 (2001): 46-47. 24. Nieuhof, Embassy . . . to the Grand Tartar Cham, 280. 25. Du Halde, General History of China, 2:138. 26. Candidius, “Short Account,” 1:527. 27. Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, Voyages and Travels, as reprint­ ed in John Harris, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, 2 vols. (London, 1764), 1:793. 28. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 20-21. 29. Cited in Seymour Phillips, “The Outer World of the European Middle Ages,” in Implicit Understanding: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modem Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25. See also Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 179-80. 30. Strays, cited in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 255-56; Albrecht I-Icrport, Reise nach Java, Formosa, Vorder-Indien mid Ceylon,

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1659-1668, ed. S. P. L’Honoré Naber (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1930), 41. Herport’s journal was originally published in Bern in 1669. The German translator of the Description also complains about such uncomplimentary pic­ tures of Formosans as “monsters” with tails like pigs (DF Germ 397-98). This detail had evidendy become somewhat commonplace; the translator even cites a contemporary German medical compendium, the Miscellanea curiosa. The citation as given seems to be in error, but there are at least two other mentions of Formosans with tails given in the same periodical: see Miscellanea curiosa, sive ephemeridum medico-physicarum Germanicarum, 24 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1671-1706), decur. 1, ann. 9-10, p. 456; decur. 2, ann. 7, p. 231. These are dated 1680 and 1689. 31. Du Halde, General History of China, 1:171. 32. Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, ed. Sir Wiliam Foster, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1727; London: Argonaut Press, 1930), 2:159. 33. I have used the text printed in the 1764 edition of Harris, Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca, 1:355. 34. Also a contemporary cliché; see for instance the entry on Japan in Louis Moréri, Great Historical, Geographical, and Poetical Dictionary, 2 vols. (London, 1694), sig. H3v. 35. “Cela est bien contraire á ce que disent quelques Auteurs, qu’ils ont une taille de Geant.” A similar note appears in DF Germ 400. 36. On this issue see especially Leonard Blussé, “Retribution and Remorse: The Interaction between the Administration and the Protestant Mission in Early Colonial Formosa,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 153-82; as well as Blussé, “Dutch Protestant Missionaries as Protagonists of the Territorial Expansion of the VOC in Formosa,” in Conversion, Competition, and Conflict: Essays on the Role ofReligion in Asia, ed. Dick Kooiman et al. (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1984), 155-84. 37. Francois Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien, 5 vols. (Dordrecht, 1724-26), 4:4:33-93. For an English translation see Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 1-9, 25-86. 38. Cited in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 77. 39. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 17, 21. Candidius’s climactic sentence doesn’t appear in the English version given in the Collection of Voyages and Travels published in 1704. 40. Another long-term missionary, Robert Junius, became an inter­ national hero upon his return to Holland in 1644, having converted thou­ sands of Formosans during his fourteen-year stay on the island. See William Campbell, An Accoiint of Missionary Success in the Island of Formosa, 2 vols. (London: Trabner, 1889), 1:15-46, which reprints Junius’s story as told in Caspar Sibelius, Of the Conversion of Five Thousand and Nine Hundred East■Indians, in the Isle Formosa, Neeve China, trans. H. Jessei (London, 1650). 41. See Hiob Ludolf, Appendix ad historiam aethiopicam (Frankfurt, 1693), 3; Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten, Nachrichten von mcrkioiirdigcn Biichem, 12 vols, (Halle, 1752-58), 9:217-18. Others, particularly the French, who

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had an East India Company of their own, were less impressed; see for instance Jean Baptiste Tavernier, A Collection of Several Relations and Treatises Singular and Curious . . . Not Printed among His First Six Voyages (London, 1680), 57-60, who wondered whether anyone on Formosa had actually been converted. Du Halde, however, acknowledged that some traces of Christianity remained even after the island had become subject to China (General History of China, 1:180). For a summary account of the (temporary) successes of Dutch missionary activity in Formosa, see Valentijn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien, cited in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 77-88. 42. See Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations ofde Bry’s “Great Voyages, ” trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 43. See Bardett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” 42: “Especially in a period like the Middle Ages, when religion meant membership of a community much more than adherence to a set of principles or beliefs, there was a sense in which one was born a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, just as one was born English or Persian.” 44. It is wise to remember the scandals caused by the enthusiastic praise of China and its religion in early modern Jesuit descriptions of the country, a development that led to the so-called Rites Controversy just before Psalmanazar’s time. A bit later, in 1727, Engelbert Kaempfer shocked his public when he concluded his weighty History of Japan by noting that Japan was perfectly happy, secure, and successful when closed to all foreign visitors (History of Japan, 3 vols. [London, 1727; Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1906]). 45. On religious questions see an early reviewer of the Dutch Description who, while wondering whether the text might be a hoax, resolute­ ly defends its criticisms of Catholics (Boekzaal der geleerde werreld [July-August 1705]: 55-56). In his response to the French Description, Isaac d’Amalvi, a Walloon minister at Sluis who had also tried to convert the impostor, doesn’t even pursue the issue of whether Psalmanazar, whom he calls “le Japonais” throughout, is really Formosan; he is outraged, rather, over the circumstances surrounding his baptism by Innes, as well as the “satires” he detected in the religious sections of the Description (Eclaircissemens [sic] necessairespour hien entendre ce que le Sr N.F.D.B.R. dit étre arrivéa FEcluse en Flandres, par rapport a la conversion de Mr. George Psalmanaazaar, Japonais, dans son livre intitulé, “Description de I’isle Formosa''’’ [The Hague, 1706], esp. 32-33, 64). Foley also cites a pair of letters from John Locke and Anthony Collins, which to a surprising extent concentrate on sectarian issues rather than those of authenticity (Great Formosan Impostor, 23). Also revealing is the fact that a short extract on Formosan religion from (the French version of) the Description was chosen, along with other “deist” and moderate Protestant texts, for translation into Dutch in a short pamphlet: Van den oorspronk en de kracht der vooroordeelen (Amsterdam, 1710), 34-37. 46. For Psalmanazar’s version see DF1 vii-xii, as well as DF Fr xxxiv-xliii. For Fontaney’s response see Mémoires pour I’histoire des sciences ct des beatix arts (April 1705): esp. 587-90.

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47. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 21. , 48. Cited in Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 255. 49. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 9. 50. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 21. 51. Montanus/Dapper, Atlas Chinensis, 22. 52. Similarly, in the fictionalized account given in Richard Gwinnet and Elizabeth Thomas’s Pylades and Corinna (1731), Psalmanazar is “of a fair complexion, as all the inhabitants of that island are, from whence the Portuguese, who were the first discoverers, gave it the name of Formosa” (cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 118). 53. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 40-55. 54. Arnoldus Montanus, Atlas Japannensis, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1670), 65. 55. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in Four Books, 2d ed. (London, 1657), 915; Moréri, Great Historical, Geographical, and Poetical Dictionary, sig. H3v. 56. Monthly Review 31 (November 1764): 369. 57. Compare Psalmanazar’s own self-advertising rhetoric in the sec­ ond preface to the second edition of the Description: “you must think that I forg’d the whole Story out of my own Brain; and if so, I am sure you extrav­ agantly magnifie the fertility of my Invention, and the strength of my Memory; for he must be a Man of prodigious parts, who can invent the Description of a Country, contrive a Religion, frame Laws and Customs, make a Language, and Letters, &c. and these different from all other parts of the World; he must have also more than a humane Memory that is always ready to vindicate so many feign’d particulars, and that without ever so much as once contradicting himself’ (DF2 sig. a4). As Justin Stagl has written, “as long as [Psalmanazar] followed the two conditions [of] source-adequateness and consistency in his stories, nothing serious could happen to his preten­ sion” (A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 [Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1995], 200-2). See also Rodney Needham, Exemplars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 113-14: “so long as Psalmanazar sticks to the mere accumulation of exotic cultural particulars, avoiding the postulation of systematic relationships among them, he is fairly safe.” 58. Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 149. 59. Transcripts of their meetings are provided in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 20. In his index, however, Foley identifies him as Nathaniel Griffith. 60. In the first section of the Description, which details his travels from Formosa to Europe and the circumstances surrounding his conversion to Anglicanism, Psalmanazar claims that the Jesuit who tricked him into leav­ ing his homeland circulated a rumor that he was a king’s son (DF1 16; DF2 185). The rumor is also mentioned in Pylades and Corinna, cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 123.;

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61. Toward the other end of the century, an actual visitor from Tahiti, known as Omai, became the locus classicus for this sort of natural grace and propriety among native peoples. He stayed in England for two years beginning in 1774 and was even more lavishly entertained than Psalmanazar, granted an audience with the king himself. See the summary account given in Michelle Hetherington, “The Cult of the South Seas,” in Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2001), 1-7. 62. For brief discussions of Psalmanazar and the Chinese princess see Appleton, Cycle of Cathay, 129; and Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 39. 63. A third case, not discussed here, is that of Mary Carleton, “the German Princess,” who in the early 1660s posed as a German noblewoman. See Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mai Cutpurse; The Case of Mary Carleton, ed. Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 64. J. M. Gutch, Caraboo: A Narrative of a Singular Imposition, Practised upon the Benevolence of a Lady Residing in the Vicinity of the City of Bristol, by a Young Woman of the Name of Mary Willcocks, alias Baker, alias Bakerstendht, alias Caraboo, Princess ofjavasu (London, 1817), 47. 65. Margaret Russett, “The ‘Caraboo’ Hoax: Romantic Woman as Mirror and Mirage,” Discourse 17:2 (1994-95): 26-47. 66 . Mémoires pour Vhistoire des sciences et des beaux arts (April 1705): 587-88: “Un pretendu Formosan joiie á Londres a peu pres le meme role que joúoit á Paris il y a quelques années une fausse Princesse de la Chine. Paris ne fut point la dupe de la fausse Chinoise: il est fácheux pour Londres que le Formosan y trouve plus de créance. Qu’est devenue cette delicatesse toujours en garde contre la credulité?” This part of the review is also cited in Johann Albertus Fabricius, Salutaris lux evangelii toti orbi per divinam gratiam exoriens (Hamburg, 1731), 698. 67. Louis Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoiressur Pétatprésent de la Chine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1696). I will be quoting from the first English translation: Memoirs and Observations . . . Made in a Late Journey through the Empire of China (London, 1698). 68 . Le Comte credits the Marquis de Croissy (Charles Colbert de Croissy [1629-96], conseiller d’état, grand trésorier des ordres du roi, ambassadeur en angleterre, ministre et sécrétaire d’état, and so on) with having first asked him to examine the lady, and we also learn a bit later that “Monsieur N. one of our most famous Writers, had already Composed three extraordi­ nary eloquent Letters in her Name” (Memoirs and Observations, 129, 132). I have been unable to dig up any additional information about Croissy or this Monsieur N. 69. Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations, 130-34. 70. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 123.

Chapter 3 1. There has even been speculation that Samuel Johnson might have had a hand in it; see for instance N. M. Penzer’s introduction to the modern

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reprint of Psalmanazar’s Description (London: Robert Holden, 1926), xxii. 2 . Gentleman’s Magazine 34 (December 1764): 575. 3. And indeed it did “give him away” in the end: an advertisement prefixed to the Memoirs notes that his mastery of the French language, which “had a spice of the Gascoin accent,” was such that “none but those born in the country could equal.” 4. The impostor also laughs at a newspaper story that claimed that the archbishop of Canterbury was impressed with the number of languages he spoke, for, as he writes, “I cannot call to mind that I spoke any but . . . Latin, which his grace having either forgot, or being unused to my foreign pronunciation, was forced to have interpreted to him, by Dr. Innes, in English” (Mem 213). 5. Henry Compton was famous for his humanitarian efforts to help refugees, Irish Protestants, and other persecuted persons (see the Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols., ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921-22], 4:899-903). See also Frederic). Foley, The Great FormosanTmpostor (St. Louis: St. Louis University; Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute; Taipei: Mei-Ya Publications, 1968), 15. 6 . An early review of the Memoirs refers to this verbal obfuscation as having been Psalmanazar’s “principal advantage” (Gentleman’s Magazine 35 [January 1765]: 9). 7. See for instance, Mem 208 and the final three chapters of Psalmanazar’s Description (DF1 299-327). 8 . Foley, who has subjected these documents to handwriting analy­ sis, argues that all of them are autograph (Great Formosan Impostor, 16-17). A contemporary hand, presumably Tenison’s, noted at the beginning of the set of drawings included in the library’s item 27: “From a Japonese (as he said) of the Island Formosa, Oct. 2, 1703.” The phrase “as he said” is inserted with a caret, as if it were an afterthought. 9. For example, Joao Rodrigues, Arte de lingoa de Japam (Nagasaki, 1604); Rodrigues, Arte breve da lingoa Japoa (Macao, 1620); Diego Collado, Ars grammaticae Japonicae linguae (Rome, 1632); Collado, Dictimarium sive thesauri linguae Japonicae compendium (Rome, 1632). There was, however, lit­ tle additional information available about Japan until Engelbert Kaempfer’s, History of Japan, 3 vols. (London, 1727; Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1906), which also included large, accurate charts of Japanese kana. 10. Bernardus Varenius, Descriptio regni Japoniae (Amsterdam, 1649), 166-84. 11. Franyois Caron and Joost Schouten, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms ofJapan and Siam, ed. C. R. Boxer (London, 1663; London: Argonaut Press, 1935), 56. ■ 12. Louis Moréri, Great Historical, Geographical, and Poetical Dictionary, 2 vols. (London, ,1694), sig. H3v-H4. In his encyclopedic Mithridates, odcr allgcmcinc Sprachenkmule, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1806-17), 1:570, Johann Christoph Adclung even derisively wonders why the Dutch never bothered to learn Japanese during all the time they had spent ghettoized at Deshima in Nagasaki harbor. 13. 'I he best survey of this material is Paul Cornelius, Languages in

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Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages (Geneva: Droz, 1965). See also Marina Yaguello, Lunatic. Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors, trans. Catherine Slater (London: Athlone, 1991); as well as Imagining Language: An Anthology, ed. Jed Rasula and Steve

McCaffery (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 14. Justin Stagl even wonders whether “Psalmanazar was ... the first man who actually spoke an artificial language” (A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 [Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1995], 181). 15. Specifically, viey and viar. Viey must be a form of the verb “to be” since it appears as vie (I am), viey (you are), and vien (they are), but viar doesn’t appear elsewhere. “To have” is evidently not used as a Formosan aux­ iliary since it appears in the Ten Commandments as zexe. 16. See for instance in Athanasius Kircher, China . . . Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), which includes many examples of Chinese script as com­ pared to other writing systems, as well as a section on language included in Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand. Tartar Cham, Emperour of China (London, 1669), 157- 61. It remains debatable, however, how much was known about Chinese by the common reader. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, Merkwiirdige Reisen durch Niedersachsen Holland und Engelland, 3 vols. (Frankfurt, 1753-54), reports having visited the Bodleian in 1710, where the library’s keeper (Thomas Hearne?) showed him, among other curiosities, “the devil’s alpha­ bet, as he very simply called it, which was nothing more than a printed tablet with Indian characters [eine gedruckte Tabelle mit Indianischen Charactern]” (3:116). We have no way of knowing, of course, whether this “devil’s alphabet” was Chinese rather than some other exotic script (or could it even have been Psalmanazar’s alphabet chart?), but in any case it is clear that a certain ignorance could easily surround anything foreign. Rosamund Bayne-Powell, Travellers in Eighteenth-Century England (London: John Murray, 1951), claims the writing was Chinese (97); she also provides a good summary of the poor conditions in Oxford and Cambridge libraries during this period (95-100). A partial translation of Uffenbach’s diary is included in Cambridge under Queen Anne, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1911), 339-530. 17. Moréri, Great Historical, Geographical, and Poetical Dictionary, sig. H4. 18. This “coincidence” was explained in footnotes to the French edition, where we are told that Psalmanazar is a venerated and common Formosan name, that it simply corresponds to a baptismal name among Christians, and that Psalmanazar’s “real” surname remains unknown (DF Fr 40 n, 230 n). The German edition also remarks on the frequency of the name among Formosan men (DF Germ 309). See Denis de Vairasse’s Histoire des Sevarambes (Paris, 1677-79), one of the most popular imaginary travel books of the period, where the name of the first king, Sevarias, is an anagram for Vairasse. Sevarias, similarly, was also the inventor of the kingdom’s local lan­ guage as well as its written characters. 19. Or were French readers more likely to think of one of the clos­ est parallels to Psalmanazar’s presentation in terms of language, namely,

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Vairasse’s Histoire des Sevarambes} The full text wasn’t translated into English until 1738, including a long presentation of the Sevarambian language: History of the Sevarambians: A People of the South-Continent (London, 1738), esp. 376-89. Vairasse’s immensely popular fiction is also mentioned by the translator of the German edition in his preface, along with More’s Utopia and Thomas Campanella’s City of the Sun (sig. X5r). Vairasse also came immedi­ ately to mind for a contemporary reviewer of the Dutch edition: see Boekzaal der geleerde werreld (July-August 1705): 55-56. 20. Thomas A. Reisner, ‘“Tongue with a Tang’: Survey of an 18thCentury Pseudo-Language,” Langues et linguistique 19 (1993): 192. 21. The correction was made for the second edition (DF2 124) but was left uncorrected in the French, Dutch, and German editions (DF Fr 144; DF Dutch 176; DF Germ 476). 22.1 am grateful to Professor Reisner for supplying me a typescript of the full version, tided “False Coinages: A Survey of Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosan.’” I have made constant use of the word list provided there. It is possible, incidentally, to expand the list slightly with additions made in Psalmanazar’s second English edition. 23. See L. Couturat and L. Léau, Histoire de la langue universelle (Paris: Hachette, 1903); George J. Metcalf, “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” in Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, ed. Dell Hymes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 233-57; Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640-1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Daniel Droixhe, La linguistique et Rappel de Phistoire (1600-1800): Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes (Geneva: Droz, 1978); M. M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 24. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 239-77; Sidonie Clauss, “John Wilkins’ ‘Essay toward a Real Character’: Its Place in the Seventeenth-Century Episteme,” Journal of the History ofIdeas 43 (1982): 531-53; Robert E. Stillman, The New Philosophy and Universal Languages in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995). 25. For an excellent and detailed review of the history of this genre, see Adelung, Mithridates, 1: 646-76. 26. Such collections regularly conclude with a polyglot table of key­ words (“father,” “heaven,” “earth,” and so on) in each of the languages included in the volume. Lord’s Prayer collections in this sense become linguis­ tics, even as the Lord’s Prayer language samples become the languages them­ selves. The entire world and all its languages become “known” (Westernized, Europeanized) through a culturally specific text in Matthew and its dissemi­ nation via missionary activity.; ; 27. Andreas Miiller, O ratio orationum: ss. orationis dominicae versiones p ra eter authenticam fere centum (Berlin, 1680) was the first compilation to include the Lord’s Prayer in Wilkins's “philosophical” language. In fact, Miiller gives three “philosophical” versions (60-61): the text in Wilkins’s

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character along with its pronounceable form as well as a phonetic transcrip­ tion of the Lord’s Prayer in English. This last rendition was given by Wilkins merely as an attempt to improve the orthography of his native tongue, often a parallel concern of universal language planners, but it, too, regularly turns up in Lord’s Prayer collections as another “authentic” example. In Wilkins, the Lord’s Prayer in phonetic English is included as a supplementary fiftyfirst version, while noting that the text merely reflects the “true pronuncia­ tion” of the vernacular and is thus better suited for the purposes of compar­ ison with other languages (John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language [London, 1668], 440). 28. Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modem Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 314. 29. See David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977); Cornelius, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages, 97-103; G. W. Leibniz, Writings on China, ed. Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994). 30. See Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de Vesprit philosophique en France (1640-1140) (Paris: Geuthner, 1932); Cornelius, Languages in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages, 65-103; Aarsleff, Locke to Saussure, 84-100; David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 174-207. 31. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812-16), 9:604-5; a letter from December 1765, from J. Ames to T. Martin. On this subject see also William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951; New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 22-36; Rachel Ramsey, “China and the Ideal of Order in John Webb’s An Historical Essay . . . , ” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 483-503. In later life, Psalmanazar himself made reference to a connection between Noah and the Chinese (Essays on the Following Subjects: I. On the Reality and Evidence of Miracles. . . [London, 1753], 25). 32. By “T. Slater sculp,” almost certainly the same Thomas Slater who revised Abraham Nicholas’s Thoographia; or, A New Art of Short-Hand (London, 1692). The title page notes that the volume has been “Enlarged and Published by Thomas Slater: And approved of by the Ablest Pen-Men in London.” The British Library catalogue lists Slater as a stenographer. The second edition of the Description included a new plate of a Formosan devil signed “I. Simon sculp.” 33. I don’t fully understand the use of the initial character am in andania, since it is written in one of its supplementary forms as a broken ver­ tical line (although only in the English editions), and according to the list of powers given in the alphabet chart it should be pronounced “ao.” The man­ uscript version of the chart gives the sound as “au.” 34. A similar design appears in the illustration of a Formosan tem­ ple, where it is explained as “the Head of an Oxe, or a Symbol of God,” as well as in the depictions of a Formosan altar and a funeral procession, where

14-7

both “the Officer of the Convent” and the “Officer of the Parish” carry “the Arms [or ‘the Ensigns’] of God” (DF1 173-74, 204-5). 35. Wilkins, for example, noted that the Chinese language is at the furthest remove from his ideal of a “universal” and wholly regular tongue: “As for the China Character and Language so much talked of in the world, if it be rightly represented by those that have lived in that Country, and pre­ tend to understand the Language, there are many considerable faults in it, which make it come far short of the advantages which may be in such a Philosophical Language as is here designed.” Chinese, in short, is “more dif­ ficult than any other Language in the World” (Essay towards a Real Character, 450, 452). 36. Arnoldus Montanus [actually Olfert Dapper], Atlas Chinensis, trans. John Ogilby (London, 1671). There is another irony in the fact that, as recorded in a note by Thomas Hearne from July 1706, while at Oxford Psalmanazar supposedly “left behind him a Book in MS. wherein a distinct Acct was given of the Consular & Imperial Coyns, by himself” (Remarks and Collections, ed. C. E. Doble et al., 11 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885-1921], 1:271). 37. Fontaney defended himself by remarking that he never said there was only one language throughout China, merely that the written language is everywhere the same (Mémoires pour Phistoire des sciences et des beaux arts [aka Mémoires de Tre'voux] [April 1705]: 590). 38. Muller, Oratio orationum-, Benjamin Motte, Oratio dominica polyglottos, polymorphos: Nimirum, plus centum linguis, versionibus, aut characteribus reddita & expressa (London, 1700). One of the booksellers responsible for Motte’s compilation was, coincidentally, also listed on the title page of Psalmanazar’s Description. Muller, whose compilation was published under the pseudonym of Barnimus Hagius, was the greatest sinologist of his day, most notable for his claim to have developed a “key to Chinese” that would enable anyone to master the language in a short time. We don’t know what the “key” was, and in any case Muller destroyed it shortly before his death in 1694; see Donald F. Lach, “The Chinese Studies of Andreas Muller,” Journal of the American,Oriental Society 60 (1940): 564-75; Mungello, Curious Land, 208-36. 39. Robert Junius, Soulat i A.B.C. ka patutugogniang ta Alla lack i Christang tu guma guma (Delft, 1645). The full tide as well as a description of the volume is given in Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten, Nachrichten von merkwiirdigen Biichem, 12 vols. (Halle, 1752-58), 9:216-18. According to a 1648 archival document sent from Taiwan to the Amsterdam Consistory, the vol­ ume also contained the Creed and Ten Commandments (just like Psalmanazar’s Description) as well as other prayers and hymns; this document also translates the title as “A,B,C Book, for the instruction of Christian chil­ dren in the villages” (cited in William Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch: Described from Contemporary Records [London: Kegan Paul, 1903], 238). Junius became a hero of sorts upon his return to Holland in 1644, due to the fact that he had converted thousands of Formosans during his stay there; see William Campbell, A n Account ofM ission aiy Success in the Island o f Formosa, 2 vols. (London: Trubncr, which reprints Junius’s story as told in Caspar Sibelius, Of the Conversion of Five 'Thousand m id N ine H undred East1 8 8 9 ) ,

1 : 1 5 — *16,

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Indians, in the Isle of Formosa, Neere China, trans. H. Jessei (London, 1650).

On Junius’s illustrious career, see also C. A. L. van Troostenburg de Bruijn, Biografisch Woordenboek van oost-indische predikanten (Nijmegen: Milborn, 1893), 220-26; Biographisch Woordenboek van Protestantsche Godgeleerden in Nederland, ed. J. P. de Bie et al., 6 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1919-49), 4:622-24; Willy Abraham Ginsel, De Gereformeerde Kerk op Formosa, of de lotgevallen eener handelskerk onder de Oost-indische Compagnie, 1627-1662 (Leiden: Mulder, 1931). Most recendy, see also Leonard Blussé, “Retribution and Remorse: The Interaction between the Administration and the Protestant Mission in Early Colonial Formosa,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 153-82. 40. Although the story is now slightly different. In the English version Psalmanazar claims that “at my desire [Fontaney] discours’d in the Chinese Language” (DF1 ix) in order to prove that some Chinese words ended in a consonant; in the French edition we are told that Fontaney had recited the Lord’s Prayer in Chinese, and on the question of Chinese dialects, Le Comte is cited rather than a Lord’s Prayer collection (DF Fr xxxvii-xxxviii). Is the French edition thus, as always, more “careful,” linguistically speaking? 41. A modern reprint has appeared as Gravius’s “Formulary of Christianity” in the Siraya Language of Formosa: Facsimile Edition of the Original of1662, ed. Erin Asai, Memoirs of the Faculty ofLiterature and Politics, Taihoku Imperial University [National Taiwan University] 4:1 (1939). See also The Gospel of St. Matthew in Formosan (Sinkang Dialect) . . . Edited from Gravius’s Edition of 1661, ed. William Campbell (London: Trubner, 1888), which naturally also includes a Lord’s Prayer text. 42. According to a Dutch archival source from 1643, “Formosa has not one common language, but almost every village its own tongue” (cited in Wfilliam Campbell, Formosa under the Dutch, 197). A Lord’s Prayer text in yet another dialect can be found in The Articles of Christian Instruction in Favorlang-Formosan, Dutch, and English, from Vertrecht’s Manuscript of 1650, ed. William Campbell (London: Kegan Paul, 1896). 43. Fontaney also complains that Psalmanazar’s Formosan is noth­ ing like the Japanese found in Collado’s Dictionarium (Me'moires pour I’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts [April 1705]: 591). 44. The corresponding discussion in Varenius’s Descriptio appears at 179-80. 45. Both Muller (Oratio orationum, 17) and Motte (Oratio dominica polyglottos, 62) include an apology for not having a version in Japanese, argu­ ing that one was simply not available. Even in the early nineteenth century, Adelung’s Mithridates (1:567-77) is unable to offer a full text and gives a list of available vocabulary instead. 46. The title page of Muller claims “almost one hundred” versions (eighty-three to be exact), while Motte tries to supercede his precursor by offering “more than one hundred” (but in fact only ninety-nine). 47. See Adelung, Mithridates, 1:664. 48. M. V. de La Croze, Thesauri epistolici Lacroziani, ed. Johannes

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i 49

Ludovicus Ulhius, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1732-36), 1:367, 3:243. 49. For more on Ludolf see Leibniz and Ludolf on Things Linguistic: Excerpts from Their Correspondence (1688-1703), ed. John T. Waterman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 50. See Hiob Ludolf, Appendix ad historiam aethiopicam (Frankfurt, 1693), 3; Christian Juncker, Commentarius de vita scriptisque ac meritis illustris viri Jobi Ludolfi (Leipzig, 1710), 44. This is yet one more convincing testimo­ ny of Junius’s fame after he had returned to Holland. 51. In his letter to Wilkins, La Croze also mentions that Ludolf’s text had been “in septem petitiones distincta”—that is, divided into seven lines or verses (Thesauri epistolici, 3:243), but in Muller’s compilation there are no line breaks at all. 52. “Miraberis forsitan, Lector Erudite, quod Orationem Dominicam Formosanam tantopere diversam ab e, quae ex ore Georgii Psalmanazaaris in descriptione Insulae Formosae fluxit apposuerim? Miraberis quod literis Latinis eam expresserim cum ex libro hoc Formosanae hauriri potuerint? Sed scias velim me auctoritate Jobi Ludolphi in Epistola ad Mulierum, monitisque Amici Berolinensis adductum Orationem Dominicam literasque ejus ceu sublestae fidei spreviste, mihi vero sufficere utramque literis Psalmanazaarianis a me congestam inter privatas schedas latitare” (John Chamberlayne, Oratio dominica in diversas omniumfere gentium linguas versa et propriis cuiusque linguae characteribus expressa [Amsterdam, 1715], sig. ***3v). My thanks to Donald Cheney of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst for his time and generous help with this sometimes very ambiguous Latin. 53. Leibniz, Opera omnia, ed. Louis Dutens, 6 vols. (Geneva, 1768), 6:1:205, 209, in two letters to Louis Bourguet from 1707 and 1710: (1) “De Psalmanassare nil addo, quem fabularum architectum esse constat, Hebraeum opinor gente, cum & Hebraica nomina in remotissimam regionem transtu­ lerit”; and (2) “Psalmanassarem illum Pseudoformosanum esse nugatorem, vix quisquam dubitat, & est, cur ex Judaeis esse credatur. Saltem Hebraismus ex vocabulis ab eo fictis tralucet, ut ne nomine quidem proprio abstinere potuer­ it, ex Hebraeorum monumentis deflexo.” For more on Bourguet and his lin­ guistic interests, see Johann Georg Schellhorn, Amoenitates historiae ecclesias­ ticae et literariae, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1737-38), 2:710-54. 54. See Waterman, Leibniz and Ludolfon Things Linguistic, 27,40, 42, 44-45. 55. Benjamin Schulze, Orientalisch- und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, welcher nicht allein hundert Alphabete nebst ihrer Aussprache,.. . sondem auch das Gebet des Herm, in 200 Sprachen und Mund-Arten (Leipzig, 1748). An earlier version without the Lord’s Prayer collection had appeared as Neu enffnetes in hundert Sprachen bestehendes A.B.C. Buck (Leipzig, 1743). No author appears on either title page, but the Sprachmeister includes prefaces signed by Johann Friedrich Fritz and Benjamin Schulze, the latter a former Danish missionary at Tranqucbar who seems to have begun as Fritz’s assistant. A later version of the book, also without a Lord’s Prayer collection, appeared under Schulze’s name as Orientalisch- und occidcntalisches A.B.C.-Bttch (Naumburg, 1769). ■ 56, Schulze, Oricntalisch-und occidentalischer Sprachmeister, 114, and

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its accompanying plate. Formosan is the very last sample in the section on Asia. It must be admitted that we really have no idea whether the compilers of the Sprachmeister had been given this transcription or whether it was made especially for their collection. In his preface (sig. X2), Schulze thanks a Dr. Gerdes, Lutheran pastor of the Swedish Church in London, who apparently had collected one hundred more Lord’s Prayer samples than Chamberlayne. This remarkable feat is also mentioned in La Croze’s correspondence (Thesauri epistolici, 2:233); see also Adelung, Mithridates, 1:667-68, who points out, however, that Schulze may have supplied Gerdes with a number of these samples rather than the other way around. Fritz’s preface (sig. XXv) also thanks Schulze for his diligence in compiling specimens, particularly with regard to East Indian languages. There was another unpublished collec­ tion prepared by Henrich Bartsch in the 1720s that purported to outdo Chamberlayne as well (see Adelung, Mithridates, 1:666-67). In his own pref­ ace to Chamberlayne’s collection (sig. ***3v), Wilkins makes much of the fact that he has chosen a Formosan Lord’s Prayer written in Latin letters, as if one using “Formosan” script was easily available (and which may be one of the things “hidden in [his] private papers”?). In any case, Psalmanazar left noth­ ing actually written in that script with the exception of the manuscript ver­ sion of his alphabet chart. 57. Specifically, ta from line 3 (in the plate), ta from line 6 , and ka from line 9. 58. The “p” in poudanga, even though it is “correctly” written in puchang in the next line. This is attributable either to a slip on the part of the illustrator or to the fact that Schulze’s own copy of the alphabet chart (copied from the German edition of the Description) was being used as a guide. In Schulze, the third form given for pedlo (reading from right to left) could eas­ ily be mistaken for the peculiarly shaped character that turns up in the plate. 59. Another example is Christian Friedrich Gessner’s contempora­ neous handbook, Der in der Buchdruckerei wohl unterrichtete Lehr-Junge, oder: bey der löblichen Buchdruckerkunst mthige und niitzliche Anfangsgriinde (Leipzig, 1743), 207-9, where Psalmanazar’s alphabet chart likewise appears. Gessner was also the printer of the Sprachmeister. The second volume of Gessner’s Der so nöthig als niitzlichen Buchdruckerkunst und Schriftgieszerey [type founding], 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1740-45), also included a small Lord’s Prayer collection, but here Junius’s Formosan version was printed in roman characters only. 60. “An des untergeschobenen Ge. Psalmanazars . . . erdichteten Description de Blsle Formosa,. . . wird hoffentlich niemand mehr denken, wenn er gleich auch ein so gennantes VU. [Vater Unser, the Lord’s Prayer] . . . hat.” And regarding the Sprachmeister, “hier ist noch viel unniitzes und fehlerhaftes beybehalten worden, dessen Aufzahlung hier unnöthig seyn wiirdc” (Adelung, Mithridates, 1:579 n. 670). f 61. Baumgarten, Nachrichten von merkwiirdigen- Biichern, 9:216-18. 62. See Adelung, Mithridates, 1:670. 63. Alois Auer, Sprachenhalle (Vienna: Kaiserlich-Königlichen Flofund Staatsdruckerei, 1844-47). The volume consists of two parts; Das VaterUnser in mehr als sechshundert Sprachcn imd Mundarten, typometrisch nusgcstellt

N otes to C hapter 3 und heraus gegeben von Unterzeichneten (1844), whose unnumbered folio sheets contain both Junius’s and Gravius’s Lord’s Prayer versions, taken from Adelung (nos. 205, 206). The second part, Das Vater-Unser in mehr als 200 Sprachen und Mundarten mit Originaltypen (1847), includes both Psalmanazar’s Formosan alphabet and Junius’s Lord’s Prayer text converted into Psalmanazarian script (no. 84). In Auer’s Geschichte der k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei in Wien (Vienna: Kaiserlich-Königlichen Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1851), typometric numbers are defined as “the system of cal­ culating and measuring the space taken up by the respective Letters,” and “Formosan” is also included in the list of alphabets available at the press (368, 372). The typographic numbers themselves are provided in Auer’s Alfabete des gesammten Erdkreises aus der K.K. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei in Wien, 2d ed. (Vienna: Kaiserlich-Königlichen Hof-und Staatsdruckerei, 1876). 64. According to Auer’s Geschichte der k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, “this treasure of types forms the most numerous collection of alphabets of the whole globe” (366). The text also notes that type-cutters are given lec­ tures in Asian languages in order to ensure stylistic accuracy. 65. In Chamberlayne’s collection, for instance, various marks are used to separate words or characters in some Lord’s Prayer versions (for example, a mark resembling a colon in the Hebrew text), and a diamond­ shaped mark consisting of four dots follows the Chaldean; has Schulze sim­ ply fashioned Formosan into another ancient Asian tongue by inventing a pause mark, which is then “explained” in Auer? The only other major alter­ ation in Auer’s “Formosan” plate is that the words kalli puchang are written as kallipu chang. It is probably only coincidental that kallipu-chang appears in the romanized Formosan version printed in Muller. 66 . Albert Etienne Terrien de Lacouperie, “Formosa Notes on MSS., Races and Languages,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19 (1887): 424. The essay was also published separately as a monograph (Hertford: Austin, 1887). 67. Terrien, “Formosa Notes,” 436-38. The gist of this argument is repeated in highly abridged form in “A Native Writing in Formosa,”Academy 31 (1887): 259-60, as well as in Terrien’s Beginnings of Writing in Central and Eastern Asia (London: Nutt, 1894), 132-34. See also the usefiil commentary on Terrien’s theory in W. Foy, “Uber die Echtheit einer angeblich formosanischen Schrift,” Abhandlungen und Berichte des Königl. Zoologischen und Anthropologisch-Ethnographischen Museums zu Dresden 9:6 (1900-1): 23-24. 68 . Terrien briefly cites this detail, but not from the Memoirs (“Formosa Notes,” 467 n. 3). It is true that the version of the Lord’s Prayer in Psalmanazar’s hand now in the Lambeth Palace library uses Latin letters only. 69. See Terrien de Lacouperie, The Languages of China before the Chinese (London: Nutt, 1887); Terrien de Lacouperie, Western Origins of the Early Chinese Civilisation from 2,300 B.C. to 200 A.D. (London: Asher, 1894). 70. For example, that Psalmanazar’s alphabet chart in the Description, rather than merely its simplified version in Auer, also consisted of sixteen rather than twenty letters (“Formosa Notes,” 437). There is also some discrepancy here, since 'IL-rrien correctly states, in the abridged version

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of the same essay, that Psalmanazar’s alphabet is larger than the ones printed in Schulze and Auer (“Native Writing,” 259). He also cites Lorenzo Hervas, Catalogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, 6 vols. (Madrid, 1800-5), via Adrien Balbi, Atlas ethnographique du globe (Paris, 1826), to the effect that the Formosans do in fact possess some distinctive alphabet, “written, like the Chinese characters, in vertical columns placed from right to left” (“Formosa Notes,” 436). Terrien admits this is an “inexact statement,” and if one checks Hervas’s entry on Formosa (2:53-56), one still finds an odd mixture of Psalmanazar (via Schulze) and othqr “authentic” travel writers (although Hervas’s selection of authorities is extremely idiosyncratic). Moreover, in his survey of numbering systems from around the world, Hervas’s Idea dell’ universo, 21 vols. (Cesena, 1778-87), 19:148, still gives Psalmanazar’s Formosan ones, with an accompanying note that they differ from all other Asian exam­ ples. In the Catdlogo de las lenguas, Hervas assumes that the Formosan alpha­ bet is similar to that used in the Ryukyu islands, probably like Japanese, which he says he has published in his own “paleografia universal.” This text, however, I have not been able to consult; according to the entry on Hervas in the supplementary volumes to the Biographie universelle, 85 vols. (Paris: Michaud, 1811-62), 67:147, such a paleography, with the alphabets of all lan­ guages, was left unpublished at the time of his death. Balbi, in turn, simply repeats Hervas’s statement about the possible existence of an alphabet in Formosa (fol. xxiii, no. 397), and under the heading of the Ryukyu language (fol. vii, no. 118), he comments that it bears a great resemblance to Japanese. 71. Terrien, “Formosa Notes,” 439-40. 72. Terrien, “Formosa Notes,” 464-65. 73. Analyzing Psalmanazar’s language samples from the perspective of glossolalia (that is, speaking in tongues), Reisner finds that the sound com­ binations of the impostor’s “Formosan” resemble Spanish and Portuguese most of all—suggesting, perhaps, that Psalmanazar himself was of Spanish or Portuguese extraction. In addition to Reisner’s “False Coinages,” see his “Graphic Affinities: Statistical Approaches to Psalmanazar’s PseudoFormosan,” Langues et linguistique 20 (1994): 81-107; an abbreviated version is published under the same title in Les langues menacées/Endangered Languages: Proceedings of the XVth International Congress on Linguistics (Actes du XVe Congres International des Linguistes, 9-14 August 1992), ed. Andre Crochetiére et ah, 4 vols. (Ste. Foy: Université Laval, 1993), 2:215-18. 74. Although a number of these connections seem rather far­ fetched, such as taufb (Psalmanazar’s “one”) being “much like Popohwan sasaab,” charhe (four) “reminds us of the turn of many of these dialects,” and so on (Terrien, “Formosa Notes,” 465). Moreover, Psalmanazar’s taufb per­ haps should be read as taufb (it is given thus in Hervas, Idea delV universo, 19:148), and the French edition gives it as tauf (DF Fr 186). “Surely these numerals are not an invention,” Terrien remarks, even though “the short account which precedes them may be something of a story” (465)—that is, that the Dutch had persuaded the Formosans to invent names for their num­ bers (DF1 246H-7). But is Terrien’s own alternative fable any better? 75. Terrien, “Formosa Notes,” 467-68. 76. José Maria Alvarez, Formosa: Geogrdjica e historicam cut e consider-

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J 53

ada, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Gili, 1930), 2:160. As Foley remarks, this would have

made Psalmanazar at least one hundred years old at the time of his death (Great Formosan Impostor, 77). Like Terrien before him, Alvarez also claims that Psalmanazar’s original alphabet consisted of only sixteen letters, and moreover that his script was written from right to left and vertically from top to bottom just like Chinese and Japanese (1:328). 77. For example, linguistic interest in Psalmanazar was reawakened by an early 1880s scandal—just before Terrien’s essay, and perhaps influenc­ ing him—surrounding a young man who had forged a complete grammar, vocabulary, and sample texts (including the Lord’s Prayer) for an actual Native American tribe. See J.-D. Haumonté et ah, Grammaire et vocabidaire de la langue Taensa (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1882); the inventor was one Jean Parisot, born in 1861. When reviewing the case, Julien Vinson, editor of the Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée, immediately compared it to that of Psalmanazar and wondered whether Parisot himself might have been thinking of his illustrious precursor. Two years later, Vinson returned to the subject, claiming that he had received so many interested requests for more information that he decided to reprint the chapter on language taken from the Description (but without the alphabet chart). See “La langue Taensa,” Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée 19 (1886): 147-69; “Psalmanaazaar et la langue formosane,” Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée 2 1 (1888): 191-97. On the exposure of the hoax see also Daniel G. Brinton, “The Curious Hoax of the Taensa Language,” Essays of an Americanist (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1890), 452-67, where Psalmanazar is also twice invoked. 78. The last word of the text has always been the most variable: in Chamberlayne, Schulze, and Campbell (Missionary Success) it is written as mikiqua-, as mikikua in Schulze’s plate using Psalmanazar’s alphabet; as mikaqua in both Muller and Motte; as mikagna in Baumgarten, Adelung, and Auer; and as Mikagua in Terrien and Alvarez. 79. Baumgarten, Nachrichten von merkwiirdigen Biichem, 9:217: “Aus dieser Probe ist deudich zu sehen, dafi die Formel, welche in der . . . Description de Lisle Formosa . . . angetroffen wird . . . , wo nicht gar erdichtet, wie ein grosser Theil des ganzen Buches, doch wenigstens nicht in der eingebornen Inselbewohner Sprache abgefasset sey, sondern in einer der benachbarten Völker, deren sich verschiedene daselbst aufhalten.” 80. See for instance Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-83), 16:131, 28:282; John Richardson, A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English; with a Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1806-10), ldxxvi n. 14 (the Dissertation first appeared in 1778); Isaac D’lsraeli, Curiosities of Literature, lstser., 2d ed., 3 vols. (Boston, 1834), 1:190. ' 81. See M. V, de La Croze, Vindiciae veterum scriptorum (Rotterdam, 1708), 210, who contends that false languages such as Psalmanazar’s are much easier to dispute once they have been published. A long summary of the M em oirs appearing in Gentleman's M agazine 35 (famiary 1765) also claims that Psalmanazar might have been better able to defend himself if be bad not been

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persuaded to publish the Description at all (9). 82. Other contemporaries wondered about Greek being taught in Formosa; see, for instance, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (November 1704): 525-56; Mémoirespour Phistoire des sciences et des beaux arts (April 1705): 590; Boekzaal der geleerde werreld (July-August 1705): 58; Journal des sqavans (15 February 1706): 85; Unschuldige Nachrichten von alien und neuen theologischen Sachen (1716): 445. 83. Monthly Review 31 (November 1764): 365. 84. Me'moires pour Phistoire des sciences et des beaux arts (April 1705): 589; Mem 198. In the first chapter of the Description we are also told how the Jesuits have managed to infiltrate the Japanese empire simply by learning to speak their language (and by dressing like the natives) (DF1 2-3).

Chapter 4 1. Charles-Athanase Walckenaer, “George Psalmanazar,” Biographie universelle, 85 vols. (Paris: Michaud, 1811-62), 36:167-77. The entry was composed before 1823 and later reprinted in Walckenaer’s Vies de plusieurs personnages célébres des temps anciens et modemes, 2 vols. (Laon: Melleville, 1830), 2:80-99. 2. See Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Faller, Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3. A number of readers have even argued that Psalmanazar would be “laughing in his grave” as his imposture continued to confuse his readers: a recent example is Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modem Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 310-17. A more sympathetic reader is Vita Sackville-West, who notes that Psalmanazar’s “repentance was at least as exciting to him as his fraudulence,” and that he “was to the last a true sensationalist” (“The Wit and the Wanderer,” Nation and Athenaeum, 16 June 1928, 359). Evidently, Psalmanazar was sometimes referred to as a “pious fraud” by his contemporaries; see Edward A. Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street (Providence: Brown University Press, 1957), 84; Frederick M. Smith, Some Friends of Doctor Johnson (London: Hartley, 1931), 111-47. Pia fraus was a term applied to holy forgeries perpetrated in order to benefit the church, the most famous being the Donation of Constantine. 4. Penny Magazine (August 1844): 320. . 5. For readings of Psalmanazar’s authorial voice (or lack thereof) in the Universal History, see Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 56-59; Robert Adams Day, “Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa’ and the British Reader (including Samuel Johnson),” in Exoticism in the Enlightemnent, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), esp. 208-9. 1 • 6 . An exception is a few pages in Day’s analysis, which I think form

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an excellent beginning (“Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa,’” 214-18). 7. Most of the materials for Johnson’s Psalmanazar are collected in a special appendix in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-64), 3:443-49. 8 . Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 1:359. Psalmanazar’s long note on Innes’s fate appears at Mem 180. 9. Cited in Frederic J. Foley, The Great Formosan Impostor (St. Louis: St. Louis University; Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute; Taipei: Mei-Ya Publications, 1968), 59. 10. Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 3:314. 11. Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 4:274. 12. “Apothegms, &c., from Hawkins’s Edition of Johnson’s Works,” in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 2:12-13. 13. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 64-65. 14. On Johnson and forgery, see Paul Baines, The House ofForgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 81-150. 15. Psalmanazar died on 3 May 1763; Boswell’s first encounter with Johnson occurred on 16 May. 16. Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, 1:266-67, and also printed in Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of His Life, ed. S. C. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 113-14. 17. This is the title of Vita Sackville-West’s essay on Psalmanazar. 18. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776-1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 1:460. Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 63 n. 11, points out that a manuscript note in Thrale’s hand written in her copy of the Memoirs repeats the same phrase at the point in Psalmanazar’s narra­ tive where he declines to reveal his true name and place of birth. “In this,” she writes, “at least a Punster wd. say He was not a fair Penitent.” Mrs. Thrale’s copies of Psalmanazar’s Memoirs and his Description of Formosa were given to her by Johnson in 1770, according to their inscriptions (J. D. Fleeman, A Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson [Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1984], 54). 19. Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 4:187. 20. See, for instance, Lyle Larsen, Dr. Johnson's Household (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1985); Smith, Some Friends of Doctor Johnson. 21. Thomas Reinert, Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Richard M. Swiderski, The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991), 225. 22. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755; Ilildesheim: Olms, 1968), sig. 21M. 23. Johnson, Dictionary, sig. 9T2v. 24. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary o f the English Language , 4th cd., 2

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vols. (London, 1775), 2:482. 25. Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958-), 1:80. 26. A modern edition is William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: Dent, 1906). On Johnson and Law see Katharine C. Balderston, “Doctor Johnson and William Law,” PMLA 75 (1960): 382-94; Paul K. Alkon, “Robert South, William Law, and Samuel Johnson,” Studies in English Literature 6 (1966): 499-528. 27. See Paul A. Cefalu, ‘“Damnéd Custom . . . Habits Devil’: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Anti-Dualism, and the Early Modem Philosophy of Mind,” ELH 67 (2000): 399-431. 28. Boswell, Life ofJohnson, 1:63. 29. A mid-nineteenth-century review of the Memoirs noted that ten or twelve spoonfuls was equivalent to “twelve hundred drops in the course of twenty-four hours” (Temple Bar 14 [July 1865]: 390)! 30. Johnson, Yale Edition of the Works, 1:133-34. 31. Monthly Review 31 (December 1764): 447. 32. On the character type of “the Chinese spectator,” see William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951; New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 121-39. See also Donald F. Lach and Theodore Nicholas Foss, “Images of Asia and Asians in European Fiction, 1500-1800,” in Asia in Western Fiction, ed. Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 14-34. 33. Day, “Psalmanazar’s ‘Formosa,’” 203-4. 34. Many of the alterations to the second English edition of the Description dealt with the sensationally brutal treatment of wives, and the fic­ tionalized extract concerning Psalmanazar in Pylades and Corinna (1731) shows him clearly playing up his cannibalistic barbarity for the sake of female auditors (see Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 118-24). In the Memoirs the impostor recalls “frequent invitations from [ladies], even those of rank and fortune, whose curiosity would not permit them to suffer so great a stranger as I was to come, or even to pass so near them without having the pleasure of seeing and conversing with him” (Mem 242). 35. See Appleton, Cycle of Cathay, 130-31. 36. See Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 42-45. It is not that Ricci and his Jesuit followers could “become Chinese” but that when they dressed as Buddhist monks they put themselves on a dif­ ferent—but still marginal—plane, since Buddhist monks were also generally perceived as foreigners. See also David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modem Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 84-86. 37. This contradiction is perfectly characterized in a comment given by the impostor in Pylades and Corinna: “I think it no sin . . . to eat human flesh; but I must own it is a little unmannerly” (cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 120). 38. Tobias Smollett, Expedition ofHumphry Clinker, ed. Thomas R. Preston (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 130 [vol. 2, Melford’s

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letter of 10 June]. 39. Me'moires pour I’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts [aka Mémoires de Tre'voux] (April 1705): 590. 40. For an overview of knowledge of Hebrew during this period see G. Lloyd Jones, T he Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). 41. For an analysis of Psalmanazar’s Dialogue see Swiderski, False Formosan, 121-27. 42. See especially Guido Abbattista, “The Business of Paternoster Row: Towards a Publishing History of the Universal History (1736-65),” Publishing History 17 (1985): 5-50. 43. Monthly Review 31 (December 1764): 453. 44. Swiderski, False Formosan, 202. 45. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 86 . 46. On wandering Jew stereotypes see Frank Felsenstein, AntiSemitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), esp. 58-89. For exaggerated reports of the number of languages Psalmanazar was master of, see Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 8 . 47. Monthly Review 31 (November 1764): 369-71. 48. A related tradition had long tried to fashion similarities between the antique culture of the Jews and that of “new world” peoples, epitomized by Mr. de la C**** [La Créquiniére], Conformité des coutumes des Indiens orientaux avec celles desjuifs et des autres pueples de Pantiquité (Brussels, 1704). The text appeared in English, sometimes credited to John Toland, as The Agreement of the Customs of the East-Indians with Those of the Jews and Other Ancient People (London, 1705). In addition to including a plate signed by the same “T. Slater” responsible for the illustration of Psalmanazar’s Formosan alphabet, the English version was put out by the very same book­ seller as the first and second editions of Psalmanazar’s Description—duly advertised in a list of publications at the back of the book. On the relation­ ship between newly discovered native peoples and the early modern period’s idea of the culture of the ancient Hebrews, see Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaisance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 119-32; Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), 295-353. 49. John Richardson, A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English; with a Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1806-10), Llxxvin. 14. 50. An ironic twist to this subject appears in the summary of Swiderski’s book posted on the Mellen Press website (www.mellenbooks.com), which touts the biography as “a major reconsideration of the Assyrian Christian scholar [sic!] and confidence man George Psalmanazar who dazzled eighteenth-century London in the disguise of a Chinese savant [«V!].” 51. Hyde Clarke, Notes and Queries, ser. 6 , vol. 11 (28 February 1885): 165. 52. See Swiderski, I'alse Formosan, 197-211.

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53. Cited in Foley, Great Formosan Impostor, 51.

Afterword 1. The centrality of the trade mission to Ternate within Drake’s voyage was argued by Henry R. Wagner, Sir Francis Drake's Voyage around the World: Its Aims and Achievements (San Francisco: John Howell, 1926), esp. 15-27. This view was later questioned by K. R. Andrews, “The Aims of Drake’s Expedition of 1577-1580,” American,Historical Review 73 (1968): 724-41. 2. According to manuscript sources only: see Wagner, Francis Drake’s Voyage, 179, 277. 3. Francis Drake, The World Encompassed (London, 1628; Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1969), 93-95. 4. The text changed slightly with each reprinting, but for our pur­ poses here the most conveniently accessible texts are Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1903-5; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 11:101-33; and Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905-7; New York: AMS Press, 1965), 2:119-49. 5. A full account of the various texts of Drake’s circumnavigation, including archival sources still in manuscript, appears in Wagner, Francis Drake’s Voyage, 229-403. 6 . See Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583-1610, trans. Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), 58: “The Chinese will not permit a for­ eigner to live at large within the confines of the kingdom if he has any inten­ tion of ever leaving it or if he has any communication with the outside world. Under no conditions will they permit a stranger to penetrate to the interior of the country. I have never heard of a law to this effect, but it seems quite clear that this custom has developed through the ages from an innate fear and distrust of outside nations. . . . If a foreigner should get into China secretly, he would not be put to death or kept in slavery, but he would be prevented from leaving China, lest he should stir up excitement outside to the detri­ ment of the Chinese Government. Hence, the severest punishments are meted out to those who deal with outsiders without the direct consent of the sovereign.” 7. This reputation has changed markedly in the English-speaking world as well, as in recent studies such as Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 8 . Cited in Wagner, Francis Drake’s Voyage, 179. 9. See Wagner, Francis Drake’s Voyage, 499. 10. Francis Drake, The World Encompassed, ed. W. S. W. Vaux (London: Hakluyt Society, 1854), 146; and repeated in Francis Drake, Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents, ed. John Plampden (London: Methuen, 1972). The name Hombu is also given in a 1590 manu­ script of Martin de Rada (South China in the Sixteenth Century: Being the Narratives of Galeote Pereira, Fr. Gaspar da Cruz, O.P., Fr. Martin de Rada,

N otes to A fterword

I 59

O.E.S.A. (1550-1575), ed. C. R. Boxer [London: Hakluyt Society, 1953], 260). 11. Respectively, Sir Richard Carnac Temple, “An Appreciation of Drake’s Achievement,” in “The World Encompassed” and Analogous Contemporary Documents concerning Sir Francis Drake’s Circumnavigation of the World, ed. N. M. Penzer (London: Argonaut Press, 1926), liv; Robert Silverberg, The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigation in the Age of Discovery (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 325; Derek Wilson, The World Encompassed: Drake’s Great Voyage, 1577-1580 (London: Allison & Busby, 1998), 178. 12. Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, Conquista de las Islas Malacas (Madrid, 1609), 146; Argensola, The Discovery and Conquest of the Molucco and Philippine Elands (London, 1708), 97. 13. As argued by Wagner, Francis Drake’s Voyage, 500 n. 10. 14. Samuel Johnson, “Sir Francis Drake,” Works, 11 vols. (London, 1825; New York: AMS Press, 1970), 6:370. The life was first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1740. 15. World Encompassed (facsimile edition), 94. 16. Is there even a possibility that the author was thinking of the “memory palace” of Matteo Ricci, a lifelong missionary in China whose best­ selling journals had just been published in 1615? See Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking, 1984), esp. 155-60, where the mnemonic tradition in China is also briefly discussed as well. 17. As in Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Voyage, 2 vols. (London, 1598; London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:139, which gives “Xuntien or Taybijn, which some men call Quinzay . . . , and lyeth in the Province of Paguia.” Linschoten, in turn, has also taken these names from Juan Gonzales de Mendoza, History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, 2 vols. (London, 1588; London: Hakluyt Society, 1853-54), 1:22. 18. World Encompassed (facsimile edition), 94. 19. In Mendoza’s History, the Portuguese were likewise astonished to find that in China guns had been in use a “long time before us in Europe” (1:129), and by the time of Bacon’s Essays (1625 edition) this, too, was com­ monplace in England. See Ch’ien Chung-shu, “China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography n.s. 1 (1940): 359. 20. World Encompassed (facsimile edition), 97. 21. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965-93), 3:12. 22. Argensola, Discovery and Conquest of the Molucco and Philippine Islands, 97; Argensola, Conquista de las Islas Malacas, 146.

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Index

Adelung, Johann Christoph, Mithridates, 90 Africa, 41 African blackness, question of, 41 Altangi, Lien Chi, 110 Amalvi, Isaac d’, 9, 140n. 45 Anson, George, Voyage Round the World, 43, 51 Apostle’s Creed, 76 Argensola, Bartolomé Leonardo de, Conquista de las Islas Malacas, 121-22, 123, 124 Aristode, 107 Astley, Thomas, New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 27-28 Atlas Chinensis (Montanus and Dapper), 21; claim of Formosan disposition toward Christianity, 45; depictions of Chinese char­ acters, 82; description and illus­ trations of Formosans, 40, 42-43, 45, 48-52; sections from Candidius’s report, 18, 20 Atlas Japannensis (Montanus and Dapper), 18, 20, 52 Auer, Alois: Das Vater-Unser in mehr als 200 Sprachen und Mundarten mit Originaltypen, 92; Sprachenhalle, 90-93, 15On. 63 Augustine, 107 autoethnography, 128n. 30 1 Ayliffe, John, Parergonjuris canonici anglicani, 106

Balliol College, 30 Batavia (Jakarta), 19 Baumgarten, Sigmund, Nachrichten von merkwiirdigen Biichem, 90, 96 Benyowsky, Mauritius Augustus, 133n.32 Berlin Academy of Sciences (Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften), 87 Bhabha, Homi, 128n. 27 Birch, Thomas, 117 Boswell, James, Life ofJohnson, 10, 102-3, 105, 107 Boucher de la Richarderie, Bibliotheque universelle des voyages, 27 Browne, Thomas, Pseudodoxia epidemica, 41 Buffon, Georges Louis-Leclerc, Histoire naturelle, 28 Campbell, Mary Baine, Wonder and Science, 76, 154n. 3 Campbell, William, Formosa under the Dutch, 129n. 2 Candidius, George: claim of Formosan disposition toward Christianity, 45; description of Formosa and Formosans, 18, 20, 26, 39, 42, 44; as focus of debate about the true Formosa, 21 ; forced abortion account, 21-24,26, 130-31n. 21; lack of emphasis on Formosan appear­ ance, 44; suspicions of his

Bacon, Francis, 75 . 175

iy 6

Index

account, 27, 28, 34, 131n. 21 cannibalism stories, 1, 28, 43, 111, 133n. 39, 156n. 34 Caraboo, Princess. See Princess Caraboo Caron, Francois, 70 Chamberlayne, John, Oratio dominica, 85-87, 88, 151n. 65 China, early modern Jesuit descrip­ tions, 140n. 44 Chinese: described as having fair complexions, 40-41; stereotype of, 122 Chinese language: viewed as a kind of universal language, 77; Wilkins on, 147n. 35 Chinese princess, 56-58 Chinese savant, stereotype of, 110 clothing, Dapper’s illustrations of, 48-52 coins, Formosan, 80, 81-82 Collado, Diego, Ars grammaticae Japonicae linguae, 83 Collection of Voyages and Travels (Churchill and Churchill), 18,21 Collins, Anthony, 140n. 45 colonial discourse, 14, 128n. 27 colonialism, 11, 20; stereotype of tropical women’s fertility, 23; violent suppression of difference in the name of “civilization,” 13 Columbus, Christopher, 43 comparative linguistics, 76 Complete System of Geography, 10, 23, 100,114 Compton, Henry, 65, 66, 67, 143n. 5 Contant d’Orville, Andre Guillaume, Histoire des dijférens peuples du monde, 28 conversion narrative, 100 copyright, 11 cultural difference, as a matter of religion more than of race, 46 Dapper, Olfert, 44; Gedenkwaerdig bedryfder Nederlandsche OostIndische maetschappyc, 39-40;

Index

illustrations of Formosans, 44, 45, 46, 48-52. See also Atlas Chinensis-, Atlas Japannensis Day, Robert Adams, 109 Defoe, Daniel, 15 Descartes, René, 75 diacritical marks, 79 Dialogue between a Japanese and a Formosan, about Some Points of the Religion of the Time (Psalmanazar), 8-9, 114 Drake, Francis, 119-22 Duenas, Francisco de, 121-22, 123, 124 Du Halde, Jean Baptiste, 140n. 41; Description ge'ographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de I’empire de la Chine, 15-16, 26, 41, 42, 44 Dutch East India Company, 18, 34 East Asian languages, thought to hold key to mystical belief in interconnectedness of all human vernaculars, 76 East Asians: characterization in con­ temporary texts, 44; distinguish­ able in terms of religion, behav­ ior, costume, diet, customs, and morality, 52; stereotypes of, 122; visitors to Europe, 37-38 East India Companies, 19 English voyage chronicles, 120 Enlightenment culture, 11 An Enquiry into the Objections against George Psalmanaazaar of Formosa (Psalmanazar), 8-9, 17, 25-26, 32; appeal to unreliabili­ ty of skin color, 40, 41; author­ ship question, 30; criticism of Gravius’s text of Formosan lan­ guage, 83; defense of imposture on basis of non-Europeanness, 54-56; defense of Psalmanazar on the basis of his sameness, 54; objection against Formosan text printed in Lord’s Prayer collections, 82; objection to

illustrations of clothing in Description, 46 Eurocentrism, 20 Europeans, early modern: blindness or ignorance in understanding difference of native peoples, 13-14; difficulty in separating Psalmanazar’s fake account from eyewitness accounts, 27-28; his­ tory of recognition of local and/or cultural difference, 36; impossibility of “knowing” any­ thing about a culture far removed from their own, 19-20; perceptions about East Asia, 19, 52, 112 Fabricius, Johann Albertus, 27 Flamsteed, John, 125n. 7 Fletcher, Francis, 120 Foley, Frederic, Great Formosan Impostor, 11, 31, 37, 141n. 59, 142n. 60 Fontaney, Father Jean de, 5, 34, 112; attacks on Psalmanazar for things other than appearance, 47; on Chinese language, 82; complaint that Psalmanazar’s Formosan was nothing like Japanese, 148n. 43; depiction of Psalmanazar, 38; on Psalmanazar’s lack of accent, 97 Formosa, 1; Dutch colonization and expulsion, 17-18; English trad­ ing post, 18; English views of, 5; formal absorption into Chinese empire, 19; Japanese colonization, 85 Formosan alphabet table (Auer, Das Vater-Unser in mehr als 200 Sprachen und Mundarten mit Originaltypcn), 64, 92 Formosan coins, Psalmanazar’s account of, 80, 81-82 Formosan language. See , Psalmana/.ar’s “Formosan” language Formosan numbers, I’salmanazar's

177

account of, 70 Formosans, early modern accounts of: classified as “savages” of New World legend, 16; con­ temporary accounts of Christian disposition, 45; depiction of as “monsters” with tails like pigs, 43, 139n. 30; inconsistencies in description by missionaries and travelers, 39-40 Formulary of Christianity, 82-83 “free trade,” 13 Fritz, Johann Friedrich, 149n. 55 glossolalia, 152n. 73 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Citizen of the World, 110 good habit (habitus or consuetudo), 106-7 Gravius, Daniel, 83 Great Wall of Europe, 14, 16, 117, 122 Grub Street writers, 9, 105, 107, 111 hack writing, 105, 112-13 Hagius, Barnimus (pseud.), 147n. 38 hairstyles, Dapper’s illustration of Formosan, 48 Hakluyt, Richard, 41, 120 Halley, Edmund, 37, 137n. 4 Hamilton, Alexander, New Account of the East Indies, 43, 44, 50 Hare, Bishop, 116 Harris, John, 22 Hawkins, John, Life of Samuel Johnson, 103 Hazlitt, William, 10 Hebrew Psalter, 116 Hemingway, Ernest, 10 Herport, Albrecht, 43 Hervas, Lorenzo, 152n. 70 Heylyn, Peter, Cosmographie, 52 An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (Psalmanazar), 6 , 17, 18, 21, 24; accounts of human sacrifice, 1, 25, 26-27, 47; anti-catholieism, 67; arbitrariness, 15; chart of

1 7 8

Index

Index

“Formosan” alphabet, 77-80, 15In. 70; confusions among the different versions of, 28; “con­ sistent” details regarding Formosan life and customs, 70; description of the Japanese language, 72-73; drawings of Formosans, 45; Formosan coins, 80, 81-82; Formosans illustrat­ ed in, 35, 45, 47; French edition, 25, 82, 134n. 45; German edition, 52, 85, 132n. 29, 135n. 46; on Jesuits, 156n. 36; map of Formosa, 25-26; as Orientalist fantasy, 1-2; rela­ tionship between the French and English versions, 28-30; second edition, 7, 141n. 57; set apart from other fallacious narratives by fake language, 96; on skin color, 43-44; title page of first edition, 7; title page of the second edition, 8; variety of “Formosan” names, vocabulary samples, and translations of Christian religious texts, 61 Hoole,John, 111 Hulsius, Levinus, 20 human sacrifice, Psalmanazar’s accounts of, 1, 25, 26-27, 47 Ides, Evert Ysbrantszoon, 31 imperial gaze, 14, 128n. 28 Indonesia, 119 Innes, Reverend Alexander: blamed for forcing Psalmanazar to translate religious texts, 6, 68; departure, 7-8, 112; immorali­ ties, 109-10; role in Psalmanazar’s imposture, 4-5, 29, 30; test of Psalmanazar’s language, 53, 65, 68 James II, 38 Japanese, 52 Japanese kana, 73 Japanese language: lack of contem­

porary accounts of, 70-71; Psalmanazar’s claims about, 72-73 Jews, early modem stereotype of, 115 Johnson, Samuel, 10, 99, 111; Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, 107-8; A Dictionary of the English Language, 106; impor­ tance and pervasiveness of idea of regularity, 105-8, 111; life of Drake, 122; view of Psalmanazar as religious and moral ideal, 101-5, 111 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 93 Junius, Robert, 82, 83, 86, 87; con­ version of Formosans, 147n. 39; Formosan Lord’s Prayer text, 82,83,86, 88, 89, 90, 93,95; long-term missionary to Formosa, 82, 139n. 40 Kaempfer, Engelbert, History of Japan, 140n. 44 Kao, Dionysius, 31 Koxinga (Cheng Ch’eng-kung), 17, 19 Lach, Donald, 40 La Croze, M. V. de, 85-87, 88 language improvement schemes, 75 Law, William, Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, 9, 62, 106,113 Le Comte, Louis, and the “Chinese Princess,” 56-58 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 10; denunciation of Psalmanazar’s new Lord’s Prayer version, 87; interest in Lord’s Prayer collec­ tions, 88; interest in Psalmanazar’s language, 10, 76 Leslie, Charles, 134n. 43 ligatures, 79 Locke, John, 36, 140n. 45 Lomperis, Linda, 53 Lord’s Prayer: in a Formosan aboriginal language, 84, 85-87;

1 7 9

in a Formosan aboriginal language transcribed using Psalmanazar’s alphabet, 89, 91; Junius’ Formosan text of, 82, 83,86, 88,89, 90, 93,95; Psalmanazar’s Formosan lan­ guage translation of, 67-68, 71,82 ■ Lord’s Prayer collections, 75-76; as basis for comparative linguistics, 76, 145n. 26; Formosan text in, 82-83 Lubomirski, John Albert, 30, 55 Ludolf, Hiob (Job), 84, 85-86, 87,88

Moluccas, 119 Montanus, Arnoldus, 18, 20. See also Atlas Chinensis-, Atlas Japannensis “morals of history,” 11 More, Thomas, 71 Moréri, Louis, Great Historical, Geographical, and Poetical Dictionary, .52,70-71,73 Motte, Benjamin, Oratio dominica polyglottos, 82, 83, 85, 148n. 38, 148n. 45 Muller, Andreas, Oratio orationum, 82, 83,84, 85, 87, 88, 145n. 27, 147n. 38, 148n. 45

Maluku, 119 Mandelslo, Johann Albrecht von, Voyages and Travels, 18, 42 Mead, Dr., 97 Memoirs of **** Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native ofFormosa (Psalmanazar), 2, 10, 17, 23; anti-Catholicism, 67; “antipo­ dal” logic, 52; avoidance of sexual matters, 109; on Bishop Hare, 116; as conversion narra­ tive, 100; on creation of alpha­ bet, 97; focus on Psalmanazar’s status as a Latin prodigy, 62-63; on importance of a consistent difference, 53; on Innes, 30; presentation of identities based on acquisition of language, 61-62; on Psalmanazar’s lifelong addiction to laudanum, 107; recounting of origins of Formosan alphabet, 77; second half of Psalmanazar’s life, 112-13, 117; on skin color, 38, 40; title, page of second edition, 3; told from perspective of a man who had already “changed,” 99-100; use of other’s knowledge of Formosa to defend forgery, 24

Needham, Rodney, 141n. 57 “new world” people, distinguished as deviant and inferior, 36 Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 77 Nieuhof, Johannes, 40, 41-42, 51 nonjurors, 6 Orientalist paradigm, 1-2, 13 Oswald, Doctor, 29 Palmer, Samuel, General History of Printing, 9, 114 Parisot, Jean, 153n. 77 Pausaos, 119-20, 121-22, 123-24 Pembroke, Earl of, 96, 114 Penny Magazine, 100 personal identity, 11 Philip II, 121 philosophical language, 75, 76, 145n. 27 Polo, Marco, 40, 123 postcolonial theory, 13 Pound, James, 31-32, 32, 125n. 7 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 128n. 28 predestination, 6 Princess Caraboo, 56, 58 Psalmanazar, George: final identity as a Jew, 101, 114-17; get-rich-

i8 o

Index

quick schemes, 9; as a hack writer, 112-13; “heathenish” Japanese disguise, 109; Hebrew scholarship, 99, 112-14, 116; Latin skills, 1,2; marginality, 36, 116; portrait of, 39; and Samuel Johnson, 10, 101-5, 111; sexuality, 109 Psalmanazar, George, AS A “FOR­ MOSAN”: ability to turn a damaging objection into valida­ tion of his claims, 25; ability to use “authentic” evidence to sup­ port his own forgery, 20, 30-31; arbitrariness of choice of Formosa for imposture, 15; assimilable difference, 52-54; attempt at public confession, 23; attempts to answer Pound’s objections, 32-33; better received than actual resident of Formosa, 15; and Candidius, 21, 22, 23, 24-25; combination of the familiar and the irreducibly other, 110; in compari­ son to two nearly contemporary impostors, 56-58; confused fan­ tasies about the “real” as opposed to the “forged,” 95; contemporary accounts of appearance, 38; creation of new identity, 1, 3-4; development of imposture over time, 16, 26-27; Dialogue between a Japonese and a Formosan, about Some Points of the Religion of the Time, 8-9, 114; eating of raw meat, 1,5, 47, 66; “fine white Enamell’d Work, 9, 58, 126n. 13; forced European readers to find out what was known about the island, 22; Formosan identity sustained by European audience, 30, 51-52; instant celebrity, 6; lack of emphasis on Formosan appearance, 35, 36, 44; as a “pious fraud,” 111,

In d e x

154n. 3; reasons for success, 11-12; “regularity,” 58, 107, 108-12, 115, 117; role of out­ sider, 115; role of the inscrutable, but morally superi­ or East Indian visitor, 110; shift from Japanese to Formosan, 5, 65-66; still cited as a Formosan authority fifty years after public confession in Memoirs, 85. See also An Enquiry into the Objections against George Psalmanaazaar of Formosa (Psalmanazar); An Flistorical and Geographical Description of Formosa (Psalmanazar); Memoirs of **** Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native of Formosa (Psalmanazar) Psalmanazar, George, “FOR­ MOSAN” LANGUAGE, 61; alphabet, 63, 81; alphabet absorbed into scientific study of actual Formosan languages, 88-97; confirmation of his identity as Formosan, 85; in Description, 70-73; development during his Japanese imposture, 63-65; in French edition of Description, 73; and his Jesuit education, 67; intentional con­ fusion about similarities to and differences from Japanese and Chinese, 72-73; in linguistic studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 85-97; Lord’s Prayer transla­ tion, 67-68, 71, 75, 82; manu­ script version, 78, 79-80; man­ uscript version of alphabet table, 68; manuscript version of Lord’s Prayer in Formosan, 69; as object of modern “scientific” linguistic study, 80-81, 83-84; as origin of forgery as a whole, 96-97; reminiscent of Hebrew

and Greek, 77-78, 79; role in the developing fields of linguistic study, 75; and Royal Society interviews, 66; rules of grammar and usage, 71-72; subjected to scholarly linguistic study, 101; success due to antipodal difference and consis­ tency, 69; systematic construc­ tion, 74; translations of Lord’s Prayer, Apostle’s Creed, and Ten Commandments, 71, 75; use of English anti-Catholic prejudice to advantage, 67; verb system, 71-72 Purchas, Samuel, 41, 120 Pylades and Corinna, 10, 58, 142n. 60, 156nn. 34, 37 racial categories, little currency among eighteenth-century Europeans, 12, 13, 35-36 raw meat myth, 1,5, 47, 66 Rechteren, Seyger van, East Indian travel journal, 20, 34 regularity, 105-8, 111; Psalmanazar’s, 58, 107, 108-12, 115, 117 Reinert, Thomas, Regulating Confusion: Samuel Johnson and the Crowd, 105-6 Reisner, Thomas, 74, 152n. 73 religious evangelism, 13 religious intolerance, 20 Reynolds, Joshua, 30 Reynolds, Samuel, 30, 31-32, 33 Richardson, John, Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of Eastern Nations, 116 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 10 Rites Controversy, 140n. 44 Rodes, N. F. B. de, 134n. 43 Royal Society: description of Psalmanazar, 38; interrogation of Psalmanazar, 5-6, 37, 54 Russett, Margaret, 56 Sackville-Wcst, Vita, 10, 154n, 3 Said, Edward, Orientalism, 13

i8 i

Savage, Richard, 107 Schouten, Joost, 70 Schulze, Benjamin, Orientalisch-und Occidentalischer Sprachmeister, 88-90, 149nn. 55, 56 Scottish Dissenters, 6 Shalmaneser, 5 Shen Fuzong (Shen Fo Tsung), 38 skin color: African blackness, ques­ tion of, 41; as indicator of uncivilized non-Europeanness, 46; Psalmanazar on, 38, 40, 41, 43-44; theories of, 6, 40; unre­ lated to place of origin, 13 Sloane, Hans, 36-37 Smollett, Tobias, Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 10, 111 Spectator, 9 Spence, Jonathan, 37 Spice Islands, 119 Stagl, Justin, 141n. 57, 144n. 14 Stewart, Susan, 52, 135n. 47 Struys, JanJanszoon: description of Formosans, 48; story about Formosan men with tails, 43, 138n. 30; Voyages and Travels, 40 Swiderski, Richard, 11, 114 Swift, John, 15; Gulliver’s Travels, 71; jibe at “the famous Salmanaazor,” 16; Modest Proposal, 10 Tavernier, Jean Baptiste, Collection of Several Relations and Treatises Singular and Curious, 18 Ten Commandments, 71, 75, 80 Tenison, Thomas, 68 Ternate, 119, 122 Terrien de Lacouperie, Albert Etienne, 93-95; on Psalmanazar’s alphabet, 151n. 70 Thrale, Hester, Anecdotes, 103-4, 155n. 18 tonal language, 71 trade, as foremost consideration of missionaries, 45 travel/missiomuy accounts, 11;

182

I ndex

definition of native “physiogno­ my,” 41; demand for, 20; illus­ trations used to depict “sav­ ages,” 46; lack of emphasis on appearance, 44; preconceived categories and descriptions, 14 True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms ofJapan and Siam (Caron and Schouten), 70 Tyowan, 25 Universal Historyfrom the Earliest Account of Time to the Present,

9-10, 23-24, 62, 99, 104, 114,116 “universal” language movement, 75 Vairasse, Denis de, Historic des Sevarambes, 144nn. 18, 19 Valentijn, Francois, Olid en nieuw Oost-Indien, 45 Varenius, Bernardus, Descriptio regni Japoniae, 21,70

Vinson, Julien, 153n. 77 voyage narratives, 18, 21, 27-28, 40, 41,43, 120 Walckenaer, Charles, 99 Walpole, Horace, 61 “White Formosan Work,” 9, 58, 126n. 13 Wilkins, David: preface to Chamberlayne’s collection, 15On. 56; repudiation of Psalmanazar’s Lord’s Prayer text, 85,87 Wilkins, John, 85, 86; Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 75, 85, 146n. 27 William III, 6 Wood, Anthony a, 35 The World Encompassed, 120, 121 Wright, David, 18, 27, 42, 44 Zedler, Johan Heinrich, UniversalLexicon, 27