There I was, reading my book on hoaxes, when suddenly I came across one involving HMS Dreadnought, in 1910.
It's so famous, it has a wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoaxSomeone who's a better writer than me ought to write up a short story of the Abyssinian Princes' visit to the HML Leviathan. It would be great fun, and incidentally give you an excuse to do a guided tour of a Leviathan.
