The myth of the noble savage is so strong that Europeans find it necessary to invent such beings from time to time. Erich Scheurmann's "Der Papalagi" purports to be letters from a Samoan chief who visited Germany in the 1920s, criticising life and manners of the day. Although the publication has long known my most Pacific scholars to have been a fabrication by Scheurmann, the work has been re-printed several times as "fact" and translated even into European languages other than German. This paper examines this strange behaviour, including editions into the 1990s!