Chapter 9
The Giants
Port San Julián, Patagonia
At San Julián the Europeans meet people so tall that Pigafetta calls them giants. Magellan names them Patagoni, perhaps for their large skin-wrapped feet, and the country is still called Patagonia.
June 1520
He is naked, very tall, and he is dancing on the beach: singing, and throwing handfuls of dust over his head. Magellan sends one of his men to do the same, as a sign of peace. It works. The sailor dances his way along the shore and leads the stranger to a little island in the harbour, where Magellan is waiting.
When the man sees the captain-general and the crowd of Europeans, he is astonished. He points one finger up at the sky, and they understand that he believes they have come from heaven. “He was so tall,” Pigafetta writes, “that we reached only to his waist.”
His face is painted red all over, with yellow around the eyes and two hearts painted on his cheeks. His short hair is painted white. He wears the skins of an animal, skilfully sewn together. Pigafetta tries to describe the animal: it has the head and ears of a mule, the neck and body of a camel, the legs of a deer and the tail of a horse, and it neighs like a horse.
It is a guanaco, the wild cousin of the llama. The skins also cover the man’s feet like shoes, and they may be what gave this land its name.
June 1520
The visitor is given food and drink, and shown the ship’s wonders. Among them is a large steel mirror. When he sees his own face in it, he is terrified. He leaps backwards and knocks three or four men to the ground.
He calms down, and Magellan gives him bells, a mirror, a comb and some rosary beads, then sends him back ashore with four armed men. One of his companions sees them coming and runs to fetch the others. They come down to the shore one after another, all naked, and begin to dance and sing, lifting one finger to the sky. They show the sailors a white powder made from the roots of a plant, which they keep in clay pots and eat, because they have nothing else.
The sailors invite them to the ships and offer to help carry their belongings. The men pick up only their bows. Their wives, “laden like asses,” carry everything else. The women are shorter than the men but much fatter, painted and dressed like their husbands.
They bring four young guanacos on leashes. When they want to hunt, Pigafetta learns, they tie a young one to a thorn bush. The adults come to play with it, and the hunters shoot them from hiding.
Six days later
Six days later, woodcutters meet another giant, painted and dressed like the first, with a bow and arrows in his hand. As they come near, he touches his own head, face and body, then does the same to them, and lifts his hands to the sky. Magellan has him brought over in the ship’s boat.
He is taller and better built than the others, and just as friendly. When he dances, Pigafetta says, his feet sink a hand’s breadth into the ground with every leap. He stays with them for many days. In the end they baptise him and call him Juan.
He learns to say “Jesu,” “Pater Noster,” “Ave Maria” and his own new name, as clearly as they can, but in a tremendously loud voice. Magellan gives him a shirt, a woollen jacket, cloth breeches, a cap, a mirror, a comb and some bells, and sends him home. He leaves very happy.
The next day he comes back with a guanaco for the captain-general, and is given many more presents so that he will bring more. They never see him again. The sailors come to believe that his own people killed him for talking to the strangers.
A fortnight later
A fortnight later, four giants appear without their weapons. They have hidden them in the bushes. Magellan wants to take two of them back to Spain. The way he does it is, by Pigafetta’s own account, “a very cunning trick,” and it does no one any credit.
He loads the two youngest and best-built with gifts: knives, scissors, mirrors, bells and glass beads, until their hands are full. Then he has two pairs of iron leg irons brought out and offers those too. The men want them badly, because they are iron. But they have nowhere to put them, since they need their hands to hold their skin cloaks around them. Magellan makes signs that he will fasten the irons to their feet so they can carry them away. They nod.
The irons are put on both men at once. As the crew hammers home the bolts, the giants begin to suspect something, but Magellan reassures them and they stand still. When they finally understand that they have been trapped, “they raged like bulls, calling loudly for Setebos to aid them.”
A landing party takes the other two ashore to find the wife of one of the captives. On the way one of them breaks free and runs. At dawn there is a fight. A sailor is shot through the thigh with an arrow and dies almost at once. The giants dodge and leap as they fight, and nobody can hit them with musket or crossbow. “Of a truth,” Pigafetta writes, “those giants run swifter than horses.”
July 1520
The sailors bury their dead shipmate and burn everything the giants left behind. The two captives stay aboard in irons, and Pigafetta, as always, begins to ask questions.
He learns that when they have a stomach ache, instead of taking a purge, they push an arrow two spans down their throat and bring up green bile mixed with blood. When they have a headache, they cut themselves across the forehead to let out blood. They wear their hair cut in a tonsure like friars, with a cotton cord around the head where they tuck their arrows when they hunt. They live in portable skin tents and wander from place to place “just as the Cingani do,” like the Gypsies of Europe. They eat raw meat and a sweet root called chapae. Each of the captives eats a whole basket of biscuit, drinks half a bucket of water in one go, and eats rats without skinning them.
When one of them dies, Pigafetta is told, ten or twelve painted demons appear and dance joyfully around the body. One is much taller than the rest and shouts loudest. They call him Setebos, and the smaller ones Cheleulle. The living paint themselves exactly as the demons appear to them.
July 1520
One of the captives becomes Pigafetta’s teacher. It starts when the giant asks for capac, meaning bread (they mean the root they use as bread), and oli, water, and sees Pigafetta write the words down quickly. After that, when Pigafetta holds up his pen and points at something, the giant understands and tells him the word.
So the list grows. Head is her, eye other, nose or, teeth phor, sun calexcheni, sea aro, wind oni, snow theu, fire ghialeme, gold pelpeli, dog holl, ostrich hoihoi. Their great devil is Setebos. “All the above words,” Pigafetta notes, “are pronounced in the throat.”
Once, Pigafetta makes the sign of the cross and kisses it to show him. The giant cries out “Setebos!” and warns him by signs that if he does it again, Setebos will get inside his body and make it burst. But months later, far out on the Pacific, when he is dying, the same man will ask for the cross, embrace it and kiss it many times, and ask to become a Christian. They will baptise him Paulo.