Patagones

The port had been empty for two months. Magellan’s ships lay at anchor at San Julián through the southern winter of 1520, rigging stiff with frozen spray, nobody ashore, nothing on the grey shingle but wind coming off the water. Then a man walked down onto the beach, alone and naked in that cold, and began to dance. He sang while he danced. While he sang he scooped up handfuls of sand and poured them over his own head.

Magellan sent a sailor out to copy him, on the theory that mimicry reads as friendship in any language. It worked. The sailor danced, the stranger allowed himself to be led to the islet where the captain waited, and there he raised one finger toward the sky, which the Europeans took to mean he believed they had come down out of it. Antonio Pigafetta, the Venetian gentleman keeping the expedition’s journal, then wrote the sentence that would outlive everything else in his book. The tallest man among them came up only to the stranger’s waist.

Pigafetta was a careful observer and he kept looking. The face was broad and painted red all over, with yellow rings around the eyes and a heart daubed on each cheek. The hair was cropped short in the manner of a friar’s tonsure and powdered white. The cloak was hide, sewn so well that Pigafetta stopped to admire the stitching, taken from a beast with the head and ears of a mule, the neck and body of a camel, the legs of a deer, and the tail and the whinny of a horse. That is a decent blind description of a guanaco by a man who had never seen one. The shoes were the same hide. In one hand was a short thick bow strung with gut, and a bundle of cane arrows fletched like European ones but tipped with chipped white and black stone instead of iron. When the crew produced a steel mirror, the man leapt backwards from his own face and knocked three or four sailors flat.

Magellan named them. Pigafetta records the christening in a single flat clause and never explains it: the captain-general called this kind of people Pataghom. Within a generation everybody had settled on pata, foot, and Patagonia became the land of the big feet, on the evidence of those loose hide moccasins. The etymology has a hole in the middle of it, since nobody has ever produced a convincing account of what the rest of the word is doing there. The likelier answer was sitting on the officers’ shelves. Primaleón, printed at Salamanca in 1512, was one of the chivalric romances Magellan’s class read the way later generations read adventure serials, and in its thirty-third chapter the knight Primaleón lands on a far island, fights a monstrous dog-faced man-eater, and carries him home in chains. The giant is called Patagón. The Argentine philologist María Rosa Lida de Malkiel laid this out in 1952 and it has held up since. The southernmost country in the Americas is named after a monster in a popular novel.

More of them came down to the shore over the following weeks, and Pigafetta wrote down how they lived. The men walked in front carrying only their bows. The women walked behind under all the baggage, faces painted the same way, dressed the same way, leading four young guanacos on cords the way you would lead coupled dogs. Those calves were the hunting method. Tether one where the adults can see it, lie behind a screen of brush, and shoot the grown animals when they come over to play with the little one. The people said by signs that they lived on a white powder ground from roots and kept in earthen pots, and on a sweet root they called capac. For a stomach ache a man pushed an arrow two feet down his own throat until he brought up green bile. For a headache he cut his forehead and his arms and his legs, on the reasoning, as one of them later explained aboard ship, that blood does not care to stay in the place where the pain is.

When somebody died, twelve painted devils came and danced around the body, and the tallest of the twelve made the most noise and the most mirth. That, Pigafetta was told, was why the living painted their own faces: they were copying what they saw. The great one was called Setebos and the lesser ones Cheleule. About ninety years later Shakespeare handed the name Setebos to the god that Caliban swears by in The Tempest, and there is no serious doubt about where he found it.

The second giant they met was the friendly one, an amiable man who liked to dance and leap and who sank the ground a palm deep where he landed. The crew baptised him and named him John, and he came back the next day with a guanaco as a gift, and then he never came back at all. Pigafetta assumed his own people had killed him for keeping company with the ships. Two weeks later four more appeared, and Magellan decided he wanted two of them for the Emperor. He filled their hands with knives and mirrors and bells until neither man had a free hand, then had leg irons fetched out and admired, and made signs that they should be put on. They agreed. They understood the moment the hammer came down on the rivet. Pigafetta says they foamed like bulls and roared for Setebos to come and help them.

Neither captive reached Spain. The surviving manuscripts disagree about how they died, one saying heat killed the man aboard the deserting San Antonio and another that the one baptised Paul died of the scurvy famine on the Pacific crossing. They died. In the fight that followed the kidnapping an arrow went through a sailor’s thigh and killed him, the camp was burned, and the rest ran. Pigafetta noted, with the flat honesty that makes him worth reading, that the crossbows and the guns hit nothing, because the giants would not stand still.

After that the story stopped needing witnesses and started needing only repetition. Francis Fletcher, chaplain to Drake, put them at seven and a half feet in 1578. Anthony Knivet claimed to have seen corpses twelve feet long. Sebald de Weert in 1598, Olivier van Noort in 1599 and Joris van Spilbergen in 1615 all reported giants; Schouten and Le Maire found a grave of enormous bones at Puerto Deseado, which was very probably fossil. Cartographers wrote regio gigantum across the bottom of the continent. In May 1766 the Gentleman’s Magazine ran a leak from the returning crew of HMS Dolphin under Commodore Byron: a tribe of nine-footers, complete in due course with an engraving of British officers standing waist-high to them. When the corrected official account appeared in 1773 the tallest Patagonian measured six feet six.

The people on that beach were the Aónikenk, the southern Tehuelche, and they were tall. European sailors of the period ran to around five and a half feet, and against that a nation of men well over six with a few approaching seven is not a wonder, it is diet and stock doing what diet and stock do. Everything Pigafetta wrote down that can be checked checks out: the guanaco cloak, the hide moccasins, the tethered calf, the painted face, the bolas-less bow and the stone points are ordinary Aónikenk material culture, recorded with real accuracy by a man who understood none of it.

The giants’ one power was the power of a story travelling without a ruler in the room. They grew with every retelling and with every league of distance from the coast, from a waist-high man to a seven-footer to a corpse twelve feet long. Their weakness was arithmetic. Every time somebody actually stood beside one with an instrument, they shrank, and the 1773 measurement finished them off. The Aónikenk were largely gone by the end of the nineteenth century, taken by introduced disease and by the Argentine and Chilean campaigns that cleared the grasslands. The giants outlasted them, on the strength of being fiction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Patagones?

The Patagones, or Patagonian giants, were a supposed race of giant people reported on the southern Atlantic coast of South America by European voyagers from 1520 onward. Antonio Pigafetta, chronicler of Magellan’s circumnavigation, wrote that the tallest of the crew reached only to a Patagonian’s waist. The people actually encountered were the Aónikenk, or southern Tehuelche.

How tall were the Patagonian giants supposed to be?

Reports ranged wildly and grew with retelling. Pigafetta implied roughly twice European height, Drake’s chaplain Francis Fletcher said seven and a half feet, Anthony Knivet claimed twelve-foot corpses, and a 1766 rumour from Commodore Byron’s crew put them at nine feet. When Byron’s voyage was properly published in 1773, the tallest measured six feet six inches.

Where does the name Patagonia come from?

Magellan coined the name for the people, and Pigafetta records it without explaining it. The long-standing reading takes it from Spanish pata, foot, giving “land of the big feet,” but that etymology cannot account for the rest of the word. The philologist María Rosa Lida de Malkiel argued in 1952 that it comes instead from Patagón, a monstrous giant in the popular 1512 Spanish romance Primaleón.

What is Setebos?

Setebos was the great spirit or devil the Patagonians called on, according to Pigafetta, who also recorded lesser ones named Cheleule. When two of them were tricked into leg irons aboard Magellan’s ship, they roared for Setebos to help them. Shakespeare took the name for the god that Caliban swears by in The Tempest.

Were the Patagonian giants real?

No, not as giants. The Aónikenk were a genuinely tall people, many over six feet, encountered by European sailors who averaged around five and a half, and the difference was exaggerated by distance, retelling and a taste for marvels. The material details Pigafetta recorded, including guanaco-skin cloaks and moccasins and the tethered-calf hunting method, are accurate Aónikenk practice.

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