Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins [Collins, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312300333
Google: MSv6w5Ba2Y4C
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 17795
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

On no point could he be made to retract or alter his claims. Ever. It was, he later revealed, a deliberate strategy:

There was one maxim I could never be prevailed upon to depart from, viz. that whatever I had once affirmed in conversation, tho’ to ever so few people, and tho’ ever so improbable, or even absurd, should never be amended or contradicted in the narrative. Thus having once, inadvertently in conversation, made the yearly number of sacrificed infants to amount to eighteen thousand, I could never be persuaded to lessen it, though I had been often made sensible of the impossibility of so small an island losing so many inhabitants every year, without becoming at length quite depopulated, supposing the inhabitants to have been so stupid as to comply.

George’s many friends and defenders, irate at the whispers of fraud,

published ads daring anyone to prove such an assertion—even offering cash if they could do it. No one appears to have taken them up on the offer. But perhaps it was only a matter of time.

Two months had already passed since George and Innes had arrived. Innes, sensing that a counterattack was needed, had already goaded George into producing yet another document in Formosan—a rendering of the catechism. But now the bishop and his other allies wanted more, Chaplain Innes told George.

They wanted the entire history of the island. George didn’t know the faintest thing about Formosa. “You have two months,” Innes said.

Strange to reflect, but it was easier three hundred years ago to get a book published quickly than it is today; Psalmanazar’s book was finished in March and in London bookstalls by mid-April. Scarcely three months had passed since Innes had suggested the project.

Psalmanazar may have been an indifferent student and an unprincipled fraud, but he was also a maniacally driven writer. In February and March of 1704, in the moments he could squeeze away from the tables of local nobles and clergy, he worked frantically on his manuscript. At his side sat a copy of Varneius’s 1646 history Descriptio Regni Japoniae et Siam, from which he freely stole, and which, just to be contrary, he pointedly contradicted. As fast as Psalmanazar could produce the pages, his Latin manuscript was “Englished” by Oswald, his translator. In the space of two months, Psalmanazar produced a 288-page book and sketched out dozens of plates and illustrations. The result, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, might have the most insolently ironic opening sentence in English literature: “The Europeans have such obscure and various Notions of Japan, and especially of our Island Formosa, that they can believe nothing for Truth that has been said of it.”

Psalmanazar did more than create a dreary recounting of royal lineages and politicians; he conjured an entire world. Writing over a century later, the antiquarian Isaac D’israeli was still so flabbergasted by the book’s audacity that he was reduced to sputtering:

If the reader is curious to examine this extraordinary imposture, I refer him to that literary curiosity,

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