The Patagonian Giants
Also known as: Patagones, Patagons, the giants of Patagonia
Basic account
European voyage reports of a giant race in Patagonia, ended by measurement in the 1760s.
Account
Fifteen feet in 1520. Four inches taller than a sailor in 1773.
Nothing in Patagonia changed. Only who was doing the measuring.
The story
The first account comes from Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan's voyage in the 1520s. Near what is now Puerto San Julián in Argentina they saw a man on the shore, naked, dancing and singing and throwing sand over his head. Magellan sent a crewman toward him with instructions to dance and sing the same way, to show they meant no harm. The man came, and was afraid, and pointed upward.
From that meeting the giants of Patagonia entered European imagination and stayed for close to three hundred years. Francis Drake's nephew repeated the claim in 1628. Later accounts put them at twelve feet, then fifteen, then higher.
The collapse came from measurement. Bougainville reported in 1767 that the tallest Patagonian he met stood five feet nine. The official account of the Byron voyage in 1773 found them roughly four inches taller than the tallest men in the crew. Europeans of that period averaged around five feet, which accounts for nearly all of it.
The people underneath the story were real: the Tehuelche, from a Mapudungun word meaning fierce people, and possibly the Selk'nam. Both were genuinely taller than the men writing them down.
Magellan took two of them aboard to bring back to Spain. They died on the voyage home.
Where it comes from
This is a European textual tradition rather than an indigenous one, and it is carried in voyage narratives and their reprintings.
Antonio Pigafetta wrote his account of the Magellan expedition in the mid 1520s. It survives in four manuscripts, three in French and one in Italian, the Italian copy in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Giovanni Battista Ramusio printed a version in his Navigationi et Viaggi from 1550, and Carlo Amoretti published the Ambrosiana manuscript in 1800.
The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, London 1628, was compiled by Drake's nephew from the notes of the expedition's chaplain Francis Fletcher and other papers.
The eighteenth-century revival ran through the periodical press: a report in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1766, then Charles Clerke's letter to the Royal Society on the very tall men seen near the Strait of Magellan, printed in the Philosophical Transactions in 1767. Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde followed in 1771, and John Hawkesworth's official Account of the Voyages in 1773.
Motifs
The people who came before
Giants as an earlier race displaced by the present one. Often a way of accounting for ruins, large bones, or an older population.
Also carried by: Bestla (Norse), British Giants: The Lesser Traditions (British and Welsh), Croatian Giants: The Lesser Traditions (Croatian), Fangfeng (Chinese), Fomorians (Irish), Gogmagog (Celtic / British), Ispolini (Bulgarian), Jentilak (Basque), Kahui-Tipua (Māori), Kalev and Kalevipoeg (Estonian, Finnish, Karelian), Katallani (Albanian), Koljo (Finnish), Milžinai (Lithuanian), Mouros (Galician, Asturian, Portuguese), Nawao (Māori), Nemri (Croatian), Nephilim (Biblical / Near Eastern), Og of Bashan (Biblical / Near Eastern), Quinametzin (Mesoamerican / Aztec), Si-Te-Cah (Paiute), The Giants of Santa Elena (Manta, recorded by Spanish chroniclers), The Gigantes (Greek), Tombe dei Giganti (Sardinian), Uriași (Romanian), Ymir (Norse)
What is disputed
Even the name is uncertain. Patagonia is often read as the land of the big foot, which fed the legend.
But Magellan may simply have taken the name from Patagón, a character in the sixteenth-century Spanish romance *Primaleón*, which he had probably read. Explorers of that period named places after their reading habits: California came out of another Spanish romance.
Sources
- Antonio Pigafetta, 1520s
- The World Encompassed, 1628
- Louis de Bougainville, 1767
- the official account of the Byron voyage, 1773