(ORDO NEWS) — There is a lot of evidence proving that the globe was once inhabited by civilizations of giants much taller than human growth. One of these legends tells about the mysterious giants of Patagonia.
Land of Lights
It is believed that for the first time these creatures met in 1520 or 1521 by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who became famous for the fact that he managed to make the first trip around the world in history.
The Italian Pigafetta, who was on the lead admiral ship Trinidad and kept a chronicle of the journey, reports that after Magellan, in search of a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, crossed the equator and found himself in the Southern Hemisphere, his flotilla of five ships reached the shores of an unknown land. Today, these lands belong to Argentina.
They stopped at San Julian Bay. At first the coast seemed uninhabited, but suddenly the sailors noticed some smoke in the distance. And at night, strange lights flashed on the shore. After that, the Spanish conquistadors called the unknown coast the Land of Lights.
Meeting with a local giant
Once, travelers saw a strange creature that appeared on one of the coastal hills. It was simply of enormous growth, which horrified the sailors. Suddenly this giant began to dance and sprinkle sand on his head.
Magellan realized that the aborigine was trying in this way to express his friendliness towards uninvited guests. He told one of his sailors to do the same. This convinced the savage of the peaceful disposition of the aliens, and he came close to the strangers.
Near the native inhabitant of the Earth of fires, he was even more frightened by his growth. The tallest and strongest men from Magellan’s team barely reached his waist. Apparently, the growth of the giant was about four meters. His legs were like tree trunks.
Despite the fear of the giant, the Spaniards decided to treat him with their supplies. The aborigine ate half a bucket of crackers and drank a bucket of water, but, apparently, did not satisfy his hunger. Then the sailors, for the sake of laughter, presented him with several rats caught on ships, and the savage swallowed them straight alive.
He was very happy with the gifts of the conquistadors, who generously endowed him with all sorts of trinkets in the form of cheap beads, mirrors and other trinkets. Then he left and the next time he appeared with several of his fellow tribesmen, among whom were women, also of giant growth.
Retribution for deceit
And this is where the main drama began. The fact is that the king of Spain, Charles V, who allocated funds for Magellan’s expedition, gave the admiral the task of bringing from his wanderings any curiosities and rarities that they would meet on the way, preferably including living beings, that is, representatives of other earthly human races, in order to could study them. Therefore, the conquistadors tricked the two giants into shackles and dragged them onto the ship.
But this act seemed to take away Magellan’s luck. Soon pestilence and scurvy began on the ships. Two captive giants died of starvation, and Magellan himself was killed in a skirmish with savages while entering Mactan Island (in the region of present-day Philippines).
So the giants are known only from ship chronicles. By the way, the sailors called them “great-footed” (in Spanish it sounded like “patagayo”). And the Land of Lights itself has since been called Patagonia.
Are the Europeans to blame?
However, there is a version that it was not Magellan who first discovered the Patagonians, but the Arab traveler of the 10th century, Ibn Fadlan.
Basically, he made land expeditions, but one day he decided to travel by water. Subsequently, he described the “big-footed” savages who lived on an unknown mainland, located at the other end of the globe. According to a number of researchers, it was about the land named Patagonia by Magellan.
Other sailors also spoke about meetings with giant people.
So, the 17th-century traveler Anthony Knivet and his team stumbled upon the remains of savages, whose body length was about 12 feet (a little more than 3.5 meters).
His contemporary William Adams described in his travel diaries an armed clash with a group of local residents. According to him, they were so strong that they threw huge boulders at the Europeans, which pierced the wooden structures of the ship.
In 1902, an Indian living in Belgium, whose ancestors had once been brought as slaves from America to Europe, gave an interview to the press in which he told that “wild people” lived in his native land, whose height exceeded human almost double. According to him, they were strong warriors and could single-handedly defeat any beast.
At the same time, he blamed the Europeans for their disappearance, who killed the giants either out of fear or in order to sell their remains later. By the middle of the 18th century, according to the source, the giants were completely exterminated, and the territories where they lived before were settled by neighboring tribes.
Today, the giants of Patagonia are considered characters from the field of mythology and folklore. But it is understandable that no one will want to acknowledge their role in their disappearance.
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