Do you know where Patagonia is located? (And no, I don’t mean the store in Freeport, Maine.) It’s the region at the southernmost tip of South America, where modern-day Argentina and Chile are located.
The first explorer to name it Patagonia was probably Amerigo Vespucci, around 1500, although according to Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s fascinating biography of Vespucci, so much of what Vespucci wrote was embellished with unreliable details (either by him or by his editors), so it’s hard to know if he actually visited Patagonia. But twenty years later, in 1520, the explorer Ferdinand Magellan spent the winter there with his fleet. He would surely have known about Vespucci’s voyage there, and he, too, called the locals Patagão, or Patagóns or Pathagoni.
The etymology is a little uncertain, but it basically means “people with big feet” or “giants.” According to the story told by Magellan’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, the natives they encountered were extremely tall—Pigafetta estimated they stood between 9 and 12 feet. (Pigafetta was one of the few who literally lived to tell the tale–he was one of only nineteen sailors who survived the voyage around the world–you can read my blog about that here).
The myth captured the imaginations of Europeans for a long time.
A hundred years after Magellan, Sir Francis Drake’s chronicler confirmed Pigafetta’s account, but reduced the giants’ size down to a mere seven and a half feet.
It’s likely that the natives the Europeans encountered were the Tehuelche Indians, who were tall. Obviously not giants, but at least taller than the Europeans, which wasn’t saying much–the average sixteenth century European male was about 5′ 6 1/2″ tall.