FORMER ACCOUNTS OF PATAGONIANS. 



97 



impressions received from Pigafetta^s narrative, many thought 

 the Indians whom they met must be giants, whilst others, not 

 finding them so large as they expected, spoke more cautiously 

 on the subject ; but the people seen by them must have been 

 Fuegians, and not those whom we now recognise by the name 

 of Patagonians. 



Sir Francis Drake's fleet put into Port San Julian, where 

 they found natives ' of large stature and the author of the 

 ' World Encompassed,' in which the above voyage is detailed, 

 speaking of their size and height, supposes the name given 

 them to have been Pentagones^ to denote a stature of " five 

 cubits, viz. seven feet and a half,*" and remarks that it described 

 the full height, if not somewhat more, of the tallest of them.*" 

 They spoke of the Indians whom they met within the Strait 

 as small in stature.i* 



The next navigator who passed through the Strait was 

 Sarmiento; whose narrative says little in proof of the very 

 superior size of the Patagonians. He miCrely calls them " Gente 

 Grande,''^ and los Gigantes but this might have originated 

 from the account of Magalhaens' voyage. He particularises 

 but one Indian, whom they made prisoner, and only says " his 

 limbs are of large size C (" Es crecido de miembros.'"') This 

 man was a native of the land near Cape Monmouth, and, 

 therefore, a Fuegian. Sarmiento was afterwards in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Gregory Bay, and had an encounter with the 

 Indians, in which he and others were wounded ; but he does 

 not speak of them as being unusually tall. 



After the establishment, called ' Jesus,' was formed by 

 Sarmiento, in the very spot where ' giants ' had been seen, no 

 people of large stature are mentioned, in the account of the 

 colony ; but Tome Hernandez, when examined before the 

 Vice- Roy of Peru, stated, "that the Indians of the plains, who 

 are giants, communicate with the natives of Tierra del Fuego, 

 who are like them.§ 



Anthony Knyvet's account |1 of Cavendish's second voyage 



* Burney, i. 318. f Ibid, i. 324. X Sarmiento, p. 244. 



§ Sarmicnto's Appendix, xxix. H Purchas, iv. ch. 6 and 7- 



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