Magellan meets the Giants or the CROSS Unmasked at Last!!

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Antonio Pigafetta (c.1491-1534).

Venetian Antonio Pigafetta was one of only 17 survivors who sailed around the world on the Magellan 5 ship expedition of 1519.

Around the world with Antonio Pigafetta.

Antonio Pigafetta —a Venetian nobleman— joined the expedition of Magellan as the official chronicler of the voyage. Pigafetta kept a richly detailed diary of the expedition in which he made entries every day of the entire odyssey. Pigafetta said that one of the reasons for joining the expedition was to gain some fame for posterity:

"Antonio Pigafeta, patrician of Venezia and knight of Rhodi [i.e., Rhodes], to the most illustrious and excellent Lord, Philipo de Villers Lisleadam, renowned grand master of Rhoddi, his most honored lord . . . and having learned many things from many books that I had read, as well as from various persons, who discussed the great and marvelous things of the Ocean with his Lordship, I determined by the good favor of his Caesarean Majesty, and of his Lordship abovesaid, to experience and to go to see those things for myself, so that I might be able thereby to satisfy myself somewhat, and so that I might be able to gain some renown for later posterity. Having heard that a fleet composed of five vessels had been fitted out in the city of Siviglia for the purpose of going to discover the spicery in the islands of Maluco, under command of Captain-general Fernando de Magaglianes, a Portuguese gentleman, comendador of the [Order of] Santo Jacobo de la Spada [i.e., "St. James of the Sword" (Diary of Pigafetta, p. 23.)

"Leaving that place, we finally reached 49 and one-half degrees toward the Antarctic Pole. As it was winter, the ships entered a safe port to winter. We passed two months in that place without seeing anyone. 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 into the presence of the captain-general. 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. His face was large and painted red all over, while about his eyes he was painted yellow; and he had two hearts painted on the middle of his cheeks. His scanty hair was painted white. He was dressed in the skins of animals skillfully sewn together. That animal has a head and ears as large as those of a mule, a neck and body like those of a camel, the legs of a deer, and the tail of a horse, like which it neighs, and that land has very many of them. His feet were shod with the same kind of skins which covered his feet in the manner of shoes. In his hand he carried a short, heavy bow, with a cord somewhat thicker than those of the lute, and made from the intestines of the same animal, and a bundle of rather short cane arrows feathered like ours, and with points of white and black flint stones in the manner of Turkish arrows, instead of iron. Those points were fashioned by means of another stone." (Diary of Pigafetta, pp. 51-52).

"When one of those people die, ten or twelve demons all painted appear to them and dance very joyfully about the corpse. They notice that one of those demons is much taller than the others, and he cries out and rejoices more. They paint themselves exactly in the same manner as the demon appears to them painted. They call the larger demon Setebos, and the others Cheleulle. That giant also told us by signs that he had seen the demons with two horns on their heads, and long hair which hung to the feet belching forth fire from mouth and buttocks. The captain-general called those people Patagoni (bigfeet). They all clothe themselves in the skins of that animal above mentioned; and they have no houses except those made from the skin of the same animal, and they wander hither and thither with those houses just as the Cingani do. They live on raw flesh and on a sweet root which they call chapae. Each of the two whom we captured ate a basketful of biscuit, and drank one-half pailful of water at a gulp. They also ate rats without skinning them." (Diary of Pigafetta, p. 61).

"Once I (Pigafetta) made the sign of the cross, and, showing it (the cross) to him, kissed it. He immediately cried out " Setebos," and made me a sign that if I made the sign of the cross again, Setebos would enter into my body and cause it to burst. When that giant was sick, he asked for the cross, and embracing it and kissing it many times, desired to become a "Christian" before his death. We called him Paulo." (Diary of Pigafetta, p. 83

"During our previous visit (in January), we had an interview at Cape Gregory with the famous so-called gigantic Patagonians, who gave us a cordial reception. Their height appears greater than it really is, from their large guanaco mantles, their long flowing hair, and general figure: on an average, their height is about six feet, with some men taller and only a few shorter; and the women are also tall; altogether they are certainly the tallest race which we anywhere saw. In features they strikingly resemble the more northern Indians whom I saw with Rosas, but they have a wilder and more formidable appearance: their faces were much painted with red and black, and one man was ringed and dotted with white like a Fuegian." (Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, pp. 206-207).

"The belief that the Fuegians were cannibals was not the only mistake Charles Darwin made about them. Listening to their speech, he got the impression that they were repeating the same phrases over and over again, and therefore came to the conclusion that something like one hundred words would cover the whole language. We who learned as children to speak Yahgan know that, within its own limitations, it is infinitely richer and more expressive than English or Spanish. My father's Yahgan or Yamana-English Dictionary, to which I shall refer later, contains no fewer than 32,000 words and inflections, the number of which might have been greatly increased without departing from correct speech?
Darwin, when he saw the poverty and filth of these people, considered that, if he had not actually found the missing link for which he sought, these Fuegians were not far removed from it. Yet they had many social customs that were strictly observed, and though lying and stealing were usual, to call a man a liar, thief or murderer was a deadly insult" (Bridges, Uttermost Part of the Earth, pp. 34-35).

"One Sunday afternoon in September, 1884, sixteen years after the Mission had begun work at Ushuaia, we were startled to see four vessels coming up the Beagle Channel, evidently bound for our harbour. Three of them were steamers; the fourth a sailing-cutter in tow.
Our peaceful little village was in a turmoil at once. Such a sight had never been seen before, and the excited natives crowded round my father and Mr. Lawrence, demanding to know what this visitation portended. Thoughts of war and an imminent attack against our beloved home filled some of us younger ones with fear.
The vessels continued their sinister advance, and finally dropped anchor in the harbour. The largest of them was the transport Villarino, the second a gunboat, the Paraná, and the third a Government tender, the Comodoro Py—all of the Argentine Navy.
Accompanied by Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Whaits, my father went out to meet them in the whale-boat with a Yahgan crew. When they drew near to the Villarino, her commander, Captain Spurr, called out in English
" The other ship, Mr. Bridges."
He waved towards the Paraná, on boarding which Father and his friends were most kindly welcomed by the leader of the expedition, Colonel Augusto Lasserre. He explained to them that the object of this visit was to establish a sub-prefecture in Ushuaia and so inaugurate Argentine rule in the most southerly part of their domain.
When the visitors went ashore they were delighted with what they saw there. They had spent the previous six months at Cape San Juan, on Staten Island, erecting a lighthouse and establishing a sub-prefecture. As Staten Island is probably the wettest and most desolate outpost of the Fuegian archipelago, and as that winter had been unusually severe, the cheery Mission station at Ushuaia, with the natives already busy preparing their gardens for planting, milking their cows and tending their calves, must have presented a striking contrast to the dreary place they had just left.
An Argentine flag was placed in my father's hand by Colonel Lasserre. Father lowered the flag that had flown a welcome to all comers for so many years, and hoisted in its stead the flag of the country in which he had made his home. There was a salvo of twenty-one guns from the ships in the harbour; and on land the Yahgans sent up a cheer in their own boisterous fashion.
The inaugural ceremony was attended en masse by all the Yahgans in the neighbourhood. My father, on behalf of the Mission, promised cordial assistance to the Argentine Government. He also spoke for the assembled natives, expressing their allegiance to the country that had taken them under her protection, and their desire for law and order.
In replying, Colonel Lasserre guaranteed the continued independence of the Mission and the ready assistance of the Argentine Government, which, he said, officially recognized the worth of the Christian and humane work of the English missionaries.
Meanwhile at Ushuaia his worst fears were being realized. After the departure of the Paraná and Comodoro Py, the natives went down with this fever one after the other. In a few days they were dying at such a rate that it was impossible to dig graves fast enough. In outlying districts the dead were merely put outside the wigwams or, when the other occupants had the strength, carried or dragged to the nearest bushes.
In Stirling House and the Lawrences' home down the road all the children were struck down at once. In the orphanage Mrs. Whaits had thirty Yahgan children on her hands, all victims of the epidemic. My mother and Yekadahby, neither of whom had ever heard of typhoid-pneumonia, formed a different opinion from that of Doctors Alvarez and Fenton, and dealt with us accordingly. Mrs. Lawrence and her sister, Miss Martin, who had come to live with them at the settlement, agreed with the diagnosis of Mother and Yekadahby—and so did Mrs. Whaits. They all decided that it was measles"(Bridges, Uttermost Part of the Earth, pp.122-124).