The Giants of Patagonia

Antonio Pigafetta was an Italian aristocrat who shelled out a great sum of money for the privilege of playing passenger on Ferdinand Magellan's famed circumnavigation, and his story is told in Relazione del Primo Viaggio Intorno Al Mondo (Reflections on the first voyage around the world). Among the most curious details of his book is its depiction of the native Patagonians as a race of giants. Patagonia itself, according to one etymological account, was named by Magellan as a remark upon the great size of the natives' feet ("Patagones" roughly translates as "bigfoots"). Pigafetta describes the initial encounter with the Patagones:

"One day we suddenly saw a naked man of giant stature on the shore of the port, dancing, singing, and throwing dust on his head. The captain-general sent one of our men to the giant so that he might perform the same actions as a sign of peace. Having done that, the man led the giant to an islet where the captain-general was waiting. When the giant was in the captain-general's and our presence he marveled greatly, and made signs with one finger raised upward, believing that we had come from the sky. He was so tall that we reached only to his waist..."

Half a century later, in 1578, Sir Francis Drake's chaplain Francis Fletcher also wrote a manuscript that described meeting very tall Patagonians. In the 1590s, Anthonie Knivet, who had sailed with Sir Thomas Cavendish, claimed that he had seen dead bodies in Patagonia measuring over 12 feet in length. Soon the region of Patagonia was noted on maps as "Regio Gigantum."

The rumors of Patagonian giants were only definitively proven fictitious when the official account of Commodore John Byron's voyage appeared in 1773. This account revealed that Byron, also known as "Foul-Weather Jack," had indeed encountered a tribe of Patagonians, but that the tallest among them measured 6 feet, 6 inches. They were tall, but not 12-foot giants. The tribe that Byron met was probably the Tehuelche, who were later wiped out by the Rocca expedition in 1880.