"In order to be published after his death"

You are in the study room of the Special Collections of Leiden University Libraries. Our story starts with this work on the right.

When George Psalmanazar first arrived in London in the summer of 1703, his claim that he was a native of Formosa, today’s Taiwan, made him famous overnight. Everyone wanted to meet the first Formosan to set foot on English soil and Psalmanazar was welcomed to the best tables in town, where he would eat raw meat and tell extraordinary tales, including cannibalism and child sacrifices, about life on Formosa.

Not everyone believed Psalmanazar – especially the Royal Society, then chaired by Sir Isaac Newton, was highly suspicious of his claims. However, relatively little was known about Formosa in early 18th-century England and this made it very difficult to expose Psalmanazar. How can you prove that something is a lie when you do not know what is true?

It was not until after his death in 1763 that Psalmanazar would finally publicly confess the truth. In his posthumously published Memoirs of ****, Commonly Known as George Psalmanazar (1764), he admitted that he had been a Frenchman and had never set foot outside of Europe.

But back to 1704, the year Psalmanazar published An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. The book was a bestseller and soon followed by a second edition and a number of translations, including this French edition from 1705. But what strategies did Psalmanazar use to mislead his readers?