How Patagonia got its name — among other things
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2004
On the sixth of September 1522, the Portuguese ship Victoria limped
into harbor at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain. The ship had weighed anchor
and sailed from the same port nearly three years previously, embarking on
what would
be the first circumnavigation of the globe, under the leadership of Fernão
de Magalhães, whose name would be remembered to posterity as Ferdinand
Magellan. Magellan himself never wrote an account of his voyage — he
was killed while leading an attack in Mactan, long before his ship returned
to Europe. Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few survivors, wrote the authoritative
account of the journey in his stead.
In Pigafetta’s account, the European world first learned of Patagonia, and
through his depiction was engendered the fascination which would draw Europeans
to the region for centuries to come. Pigafetta describes the Europeans’ first
contact with the Patagonians:
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, and he was well proportioned.
Later on, Pigafetta remarks, “the captain-general called those people
Patagoni.”
The christening is not elaborated within Pigafetta’s narrative, however,
leaving the reader to assume on his own whence the name must have come. The
dominant belief since Pigafetta’s time has been that “Patagonia” is
the Spanish equivalent of “big feet” or “land of big-footed
people.” This is, however, improbable; pata can be translated from
Spanish as “foot,” but the suffix -gon means nothing at all,
a fact that makes a simple translatory origin unlikely.
Recent scholars have suggested another answer to the question, deriving
from a Spanish romance called Primaleón of Greece, first published in Castille
in 1512 and subsequently republished several times throughout Europe. In
the story, Primaleón — a dashing and civilized explorer — discovers
a “cruell and barbarous” people who eat raw flesh, are “cloathed
in wilde beasts skinnes,” and are “so ill-favoured and deformed,
as it was a thing right mervailous to behold them.” Among these savages
lives the creature Patagon, who is described as:
the strangest mishapen and counterfeite creature in the world: He hath good understanding, [and] is amorous of women… He hath the face of a Dogge, great ears, which hang down upon his shoulders, his teeth sharpe and big, standing out of his mouth very much: his feete are like a Harts, and he runneth wondrous lightly.
The descriptions offered both of this barbarous race and of Patagon resemble
Pigafetta’s depiction of the Patagonian natives to a suspicious
degree — like
the characters in Primaleón, the Patagonians “live on raw
flesh,” “clothe
themselves in…skins,” are “jealous of their wives” (i.e., amorous of women), and “run swifter than horses.” Their height
and ugliness to European eyes can account for yet another element of
the comparison. The connection cannot be explicitly proven but certainly
bears
consideration.
Regardless of the exact origin of the name, Patagonia became immediately
and indelibly associated in the European mind with giants. Early maps of
the New World labeled Patagonia regio gigantum, region of giants, and included
startling illustrations of nine-foot men ramming arrows down their throats
and dwarfing their European counterparts.
Serious debate over the proposed existence of the Patagonian Goliaths
would carry well into the 18th century, making it one of the most impressive
travel lies in history, which “caused the newspapers of the world
to use up a small river of ink in reporting a race of nine-foot giants
in Patagonia.”
Although modern scholastic impressions of Pigafetta are not terribly
favorable (Percy Adams calls the chronicler “superstitious and
addicted to the marvelous, delighting to record wonders and exaggerations”),
more contemporary audiences read Pigafetta with wonder, creating a martyr
of Magellan and a
hero-by-proxy of Pigafetta, whose fame far outstripped his actual literary
merit. The veracity of his account was reinforced by narratives from
several subsequent voyagers, including Anthony Knivet’s
narrative of a South Atlantic adventure in 1591, sometimes erroneously
credited to the voyage of Sir Thomas Cavendish, and a composite narrative
detailing
Sir Francis Drake’s 1578 voyage to the Magellanic Straits, written
50 years afterwards by Drake’s nephew and augmented by the journal
of Francis Fletcher, who had been chaplain on Drake’s ship.
The addition of such famous personages to these travel narratives made them
name-droppingly credible in ways they would not have otherwise been.
Other, less star-studded narratives also lent an aura of truth to the original
image.
Passages like this one from Charles Debrosses’ Historie des
navigations aux terres australes, published in 1756, helped to perpetuate the giant
saga:
The coast of Port Desire is inhabited by giants fifteen to sixteen palms high. I have myself measured the footprint of one of them on the riverbank, which was four times longer than one of ours. I have also measured the corpses of two men recently buried by the river, which were fourteen spans long. Three of our men, who were later taken by the Spanish on the coast of Brazil, assured me that one day on the other side of the coast they had to sail out to sea because the giants started throwing great blocks of stone of astonishing size from the beach right at their boat. In Brazil I saw one of these giants which Alonso Díaz had captured at Port Saint Julien: he was just a boy but was already thirteen spans tall. These people go about naked and have long hair; the one I saw in Brazil was healthy-looking and well proportioned for his height. I can say nothing about his habits, not having spent any time with him, but the Portuguese tell me that he is no better than the other cannibals along the coast of La Plata.
First-person accounts and testimonies accumulated between the 16th and 18th
centuries, creating not only a stronger myth but a narrative tradition around
the myth, allowing the phenomenon to solidify into generally accepted fact.
However, there was always room for doubt. Not all travelers to Patagonia
between 1520 and the mid-18th century saw giants or even believed in
their existence. Some skeptics even risked literary ridicule and failure
by suggesting
such a thing in their
texts. This was more common among non-Spanish, and especially among English,
narrators; perpetuating the infamy of the Spanish as barbarians, as gold-mongers,
and as liars was just as appealing to English audiences, albeit in a
very different way, as were fantastic tales of giants in an America they
were
likely never to see.
The scientific atmosphere and rational discourse of the 18th century seemed
likely to squelch the subject of giants, which had fallen from literary
prominence in the last decades. In 1767, however, the giant craze resurfaced
in full
force with the return of the H.M.S. Dolphin to port. Captain
John Byron, after confiscating all on-board journals and extracting oaths
from his officers that only one account of the journey would be published,
came forward with the announcement that the controversy was over: the Dolphin had
come into contact with the fabled Patagonian giants, and they were giants
indeed.
Europe was thus entirely re-convinced of (although many had never doubted)
the existence of a race of giants inhabiting the distant and uncharted
lands of Patagonia. The “official” account published by an
anonymous “Officer
on Board the said Ship,” Voyage Round the World in His Majesty’s
Ship the Dolphin, hailed the voyage as
putting an end to the dispute, which for two centuries and a half has subsisted between geographers, in relation to the reality of there being a nation of people of such an amazing stature, of which the concurrent testimony of all on board the Dolphin and Tamer can now leave no room for doubt.
Voyage became an instant bestseller; booksellers in England and France
could hardly keep it in stock. Strangely, only nine pages of the
181-page text
dealt with Patagonia; it was, after all, a narrative of a global
circumnavigation and had quite a bit of ground to cover. Those nine pages,
however,
sold thousands of copies, and sparked a frenzy of new and re-publications
of prior accounts hoping to feed off the giant craze.
Among the most popular of the revivals was Byron’s earlier Narrative
of the Honourable John Byron, a short account of the wreck of
the H.M.S.
Wager in 1740, also on the shores of Patagonia. Byron encounters
Patagonians in this earlier text, but apparently of the wrong, non-gigantic,
variety;
this volume, originally deemed “too unimportant for publication,” was
now frantically printed and “thrown to the ravenous public,
who scanned it eagerly but unsuccessfully for further information
about
the giants.”
In Voyage, Byron is depicted as a fearless captain, leaping ashore
with his officers and men to meet with the giants. He is also a clever
captain,
who “had
the precaution to take with him on shore a great number of trinkets, such
as strings of beads, ribbons, and the like, in order to convince them of
our amicable disposition.” Having safely landed with his baubles,
Byron distributes them:
with great freedom, giving to each of them some, as far as they went. The method he made use of to facilitate the distribution of them, was by making the Indians sit down on the ground, that he might put the strings of beads &c. round their necks; and such was their extraordinary size, that in this situation they were almost as high as the Commodore when standing.
The image produced by this passage is one of paternalistic warmth
and largesse; Byron “makes” the Indians sit on the ground,
thus salvaging his height advantage, and distributes favors to the
natives, who are “so delighted with the different
trinkets… that the Commodore could scarcely refrain from caressing
them.”
The frontispiece of the Voyage depicts an English sailor giving
a biscuit to one of the nine-foot Patagonian women (see photo, above).
The scene is a pleasant one;
the European sailor and the woman smile at one another while the
Patagonian husband
looks on. The image is set against a vast sea, a reminder of the
Dolphin’s long journey.
In another image, a similar event is taking place between the European
and the Patagonian man. The elements common to these two images:
the ocean, the
act of giving by the European visitor (in the latter case, an exchange),
and the maternal depiction of the Patagonian woman, suggest that
these are friendly giants, capable of understanding European ideas about
commerce, family structure, and honorable conduct, despite their
evident savagery.
By 1773, however, the giant craze had lost momentum. In that year,
Dr. John Hawkesworth published a newly edited anthology of accounts
from
the voyages
taken by Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and Cook, which exposed much of
the exaggeration and contradiction in the popularly published material. Public
interest in the giants waned dramatically
in both England and France as a result and was not to be resurrected
again.
The question remains, however, “why, in an Age of Reason, was
the world still so ready to accept stories like these?” — the
outbreak of 1767 certainly seems short-lived, but what conditions provided
the necessary credence for such a possibility?
Biblical and Classical references to giants and other mythical monsters
permeated European thought; these stories — the Odyssey, David
and Goliath, Primaleón, etc. — were
told for centuries, even millennia. Thus, the existence of giants
was firmly planted in the European subconscious realm of possibility.
As Adams suggests, “Man’s
love for the marvelous in any form has always been fed by travelers
and pseudo travelers, by historians and pseudo historians, and among
the marvels reported
before Byron’s return were many accounts of giants.” The
Dutch explorer Henry Schouten, for example, published his discovery
of an island
of hairy giants in 1671, which included a map, drawings, and an account
of the government, religion, customs, and physical nature of this
supposedly isolated and therefore unknown society, in which men grew
to be above
12 feet tall and were covered in coarse hair.
Even after the giant fad itself had subsided, its influence continued
to be felt in European attitudes toward Patagonia. Residual discussions
of
the natives’ stature appearing in 19th- and 20th-century narratives alluded
to the affair and to its continuing presence in the European mind (in 1873,
Colonel Musters wrote in his Patagonian narrative that “the first question
asked about the Patagonians by curious English friends has invariably had
reference to their traditionary stature. Are they giants or not?”).
The 250-year giant saga had infused European perceptions of the region
with an aromatic mystery, golden legends, and a sense that Patagonia
existed on the extreme outskirts of the world, and of reality; thus,
mysterious and romantic imagery
persisted in
Patagonian travel writings throughout the 19th- and 20th-centuries.
Carolyne Ryan, an anthropology and history major from
Elm Grove, graduated in June 2004 with magna cum laude honors both
in course and in independent study.
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, she received the 2004 William F. Raney Prize
in History and was cited for “her exceptional performance in history
courses, for the breadth and excellence of her scholarly undertakings — in
written, spoken, and visual forms — and for the characteristic grace
with which she has completed them.”