“On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Virginia Woolf famously declared. Woolf not only helped bring about modernism; she dared give it a start date. But she could have set that start date earlier in the year. On February 7, 1910, Woolf and three other members of the emerging Bloomsbury group, including Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen, played a hoax on the famed British battleship H.M.S. Dreadnought by impersonating the emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. Donning blackface, fake beards, and turbans, the group managed to board the ship as honored visitors—with two additional members pretending to be their guides, essentially posing as themselves. The ringleader of the half-dozen hoaxers, Horace de Vere Cole, wrote in a letter that came to light more than a hundred years later, “I was so amused at being just myself in a tall hat—I had no disguise whatever and talked in an ordinary friendly way to everyone—the others talked nonsense. We had all learned some Swahili: I said they were ‘jolly savages’ but that I didn’t understand much of what they said.” “A rum lingo they speak,” one of the Dreadnought’s junior officers grumbled under his breath, but the ship’s officers, who happened to include a cousin of Woolf (then still named Virginia Stephen), failed to recognize the blackface troupe as anything but genuine. The crew toured the group around, welcoming them with a red carpet and sending the retinue on their way in a carriage—right before their beards fell off.

Soon after, the story of the hoax broke, causing much embarrassment for the proud British Navy; some officers, including Woolf’s cousin, issued threats against the perpetrators. Most who learned of the incident, however, including the ship’s captain, thought it a fine prank. Woolf and her husband, Leonard, later published “The ‘Dreadnought’ Hoax,” an account written by her brother, at their Hogarth Press, in 1936. In it, Stephen, who had played one of the guides, described the mind-set of the hoaxers. “By the time we reached the Dreadnought,” he wrote, “the expedition had become for me at any rate almost an affair of every day. It was hardly a question any longer of a hoax. We were almost acting the truth.”

Why did these future members of the modernist literary movement darken their skin, speak “gibberish fluently,” pretending it was Swahili, and board the primary guardian of the British fleet? Why show up at His Majesty’s Ship, the very symbol of empire, masquerading as “black”—or at least blackened—and, in the case of the future Virginia Woolf, as male? Even as a burlesque, the Dreadnought hoax enacted a truth not just about those the hoaxers fooled but about the hoaxers themselves.

By the time of the Dreadnought escapade, blackface was regularly used in the United States among white ethnic immigrants, who once would have been labelled less than white, as a way of signalling that they were quintessentially American. As with blackface minstrelsy, begun in the nineteenth century, the hoaxers’ donning of blackface indicated that they could become something not just new but foreign, not just foreign but American, and not just American but literally black. This view may best be called exoticist—a way of both wanting the foreign and finding it wanting. The exoticist not only takes in what Edward Said terms Orientalism, conceiving the Orient as something against which the West defines itself, but also connects these ideas across other formalized kinds of exoticism. All are tied to desire. Exoticists rely on race mainly to define themselves as well beyond it, playing foreign in order to contend, or content themselves, that they belong. Nothing can be more American than wearing blackface or redskin; nothing more British than donning a dark beard and turban. While not always white, the exoticist is always at home.

In boarding the most prominent vessel of the British fleet, an emblem of its soon-to-fade empire, the “jolly savages” showed up the British Empire while also making fun of an Abyssinia where royalty was only an illusion. What the Dreadnoughts spoke was the language of the hoax—elemental, bearded, gibberish as native tongue. Like the hoax, it was contagious: one of the “Swahili” phrases they reportedly uttered, “bunga-bunga,” would become “public catchwords for a time, and were introduced as tags into music-hall songs and so forth,” Stephen wrote. (Much later, the term was renewed by Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who called his sex parties Bunga Bunga parties, playing on a common racist joke; the familiar exoticist combination of racism and sex keeps on ticking.)

That the hoaxers referred to Abyssinia, not Ethiopia, also indicates something about the worldview behind it. To pose as Abyssinian royalty was to invoke the stuff of British literature, whether Samuel Johnson’s “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia” (1759) or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1798) (“In a vision I once saw: / It was an Abyssinian maid, / And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora”). It was a place that was often spoken of but rarely seen. Yet the Dreadnought hoax occurred just as Ethiopia was becoming a force in the new world in both senses—while “Ethiopian” was cited as the lowest of racial categories by pseudoscientists of the time, Ethiopianism was also the name given to a burgeoning Pan-African movement that was then at its height in America. Ethiopia became a symbolic home for the progressive “New Negro,” with black writers invoking an Ethiopian homeland the way the Harlem Renaissance would invoke Mother Africa soon after. That the Dreadnought hoaxers misspelled the land as “Abbysinia” in a telegram to the commander of the Home Fleet before they arrived, a clue he surely should have caught, also indicates that the country being conjured was only an idea—a backdrop, or a black one—an abyss.

The photographs of the Dreadnought hoax, our main means of knowing what the cohort looked like, are as staged as the hoax itself. They were taken in a studio and encapsulate the empire’s descent from Victorian to Edwardian to soon-to-be-war-torn Britain—a parody of power. The whole affair wouldn’t have worked as well as a hoax if it were completely convincing; the fake beard must be obvious, if only after the fact. Just as male-to-female drag doesn’t seek to transform its performer into an actual woman but rather plays with the idea of femininity, especially its enforced excesses, the dark makeup that the hoaxers wore proved homage and parody in one. The hoax also honored an earlier prank, which Stephen and Cole committed as students at Cambridge, in which they pretended that one of them was the “Sultan of Zanzibar,” in blackface, and paid a visit to the town mayor.

Might the Dreadnought hoax put us in mind of another group of white folks who darkened their skins and boarded a ship to disrupt and mock the British Empire a century or so before? The Boston Tea Party had announced a revolution and also an American aesthetic of “redface,” which was simultaneously stolen and native-born. The Dreadnought hoax announced a change in human character as well as in the character of the hoax itself. This change was predicated on race—or at least on its pretense.

This is to say that the Dreadnought hoax managed something peculiarly American. For, while the blackamoor had been a tradition in British culture at least since Shakespeare, the figure had proved so invisible as to be tragic—a role trapped in dark skin or glimpsed in shadows at the corner of a painting’s frame. The Dreadnoughts’ blackface more resembled America’s, and its aspiration as the first national popular culture. If blackface, from its start, in the eighteen-thirties, had been one of the things that white Americans used to signal their nativeness, now the Dreadnoughts used it to signal their foreignness—pretending to be foreign powers while pretending to be themselves.

Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech, but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin. Such a view was central to the formation of the idea of race, with religion and so-called science seeing the “Ethiopian” as degraded and devolved from whites. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil,” a Bible verse, from Jeremiah, says. Society’s conflation of the Ethiopian and evil, skin and permanence, blackness and irredeemable nature, would find regular justification in these words. Indeed, the Biblical Adam and Eve origin story would often prove the only argument against the theory of blacks being a separate species, even as chapter and verse were cited to justify slavery, too.

Blackness, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became seen as a mere disease, with negroes descended not from Adam or even the fabled “mark of Cain” but degenerated from corrupted environment, atavistic savagery, or worse. One prominent American Philosophical Society member, writing to Thomas Jefferson, in 1797, suggested that the resulting “black color (as it is called)” of those “known by the epithet of negroes” was “Derived from the Leprosy.” (Jefferson didn’t exactly disagree.) Might the Dreadnought hoaxers’ faked Ethiopia also be referring, however obliquely, to the leopard’s spots, blackness an epithet they could simply scrub off?

This is the second in a series of pieces adapted from “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News,” which will be published in November by Graywolf Press. The first piece examined race, the penny press, and the Moon Hoax of 1835.