When it became too cold to fish, Magellan sent a party of four armed men—all that he was willing to risk—to explore the interior. They had two goals, to plant a cross on the highest mountain they could climb and to befriend Indians, if they found any. The landscape proved more rugged than they had anticipated, and they were unable to make much progress or to ascend any of the distant mountains. Instead, they selected a lower mountain close to the harbor, named it “Mount of Christ,” fixed their cross on the summit, and returned to the waiting ships, where they confidently reported that there was no sign of human life around Port Saint Julian.
Despite the empty winter months stretching before them, Magellan was determined to await the coming of spring before he ventured into the treacherous ocean and resumed searching for the strait. To keep his men occupied, he ordered a detachment ashore to construct a small stone enclosure for a forge to be used to repair the ships’ metal fittings, but even this modest project ended in frustration because the weather became so bitter that several sailors suffered crippling frostbite on their fingers.
Amid the intense suffering and hardship, discontent spread among the crew members. As the prospect of another mutiny loomed, Magellan, along with everyone else in the fleet, was distracted by an unexpected sight: a distant plume of smoke wafting over the landscape. Perhaps they were not alone, after all.
“We remained two whole months without ever seeing anyone,” wrote Pigafetta of their stay in Port Saint Julian. “But one day (without anyone expecting it) we saw a giant who was on the shore, quite naked, and who danced, leaped, and sang, while he threw sand and dust on his head. . . . Our captain sent one of his men toward him, charging him to leap and sing like the other to reassure him and show him friendship. Which he did.”
The strange rite recommended by Magellan worked; after watching the European seaman imitate his gestures, the giant appeared peaceful and eager to socialize, as the dancing continued.
On seeing the giant, every sailor in Port Saint Julian thought immediately of the ghastly fate that had befallen the landing party of Juan de Solis five years before. “In time past these tall men called Canibali, in this river, ate a Spanish captain named Juan de Solis and sixty men who had gone, as we did, to discover land, trusting too much in them,” Pigafetta wrote, inflating the number of victims in Solis’s party, but otherwise invoking that horrible event with clarity.
Eager to make contact but wary of falling into a trap, Magellan took the precaution of inviting the giant to meet him in an isolated, protected setting, rather than allowing himself or his men to be lured to an unfamiliar spot where they might be ambushed. “Immediately the man of the ship, dancing, led this giant to a small island where the captain awaited him. And when he was before us, he began to marvel and to be afraid, and he raised one finger upward, believing that we came from heaven.”
The Europeans marveled at the giant’s stature. Some crew members reached only the waist of the giant, who was said to be twelve or thirteen palmos tall—a palmo being the equivalent of a hand span. By this measurement, he and giants like him stood over eight feet tall. Pigafetta, who had been silent during the mutiny, recovered his powers of description the moment the giant appeared. “He was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist,” the official chronicler observed. “He had a very large face, painted round with red, and his eyes also were painted round with yellow, and in the middle of his cheeks he had two hearts painted. He had hardly any hairs on his head, and was painted white.”
The giant was a member of the tribe known as the Tehuelche Indians, who were numerous throughout the region. In reality, the Tehuelche measured about six feet tall; the impression of the Indian’s great stature derived in part from his costume and especially the elaborate boots he wore, which added to his height. “When he was brought to the captain, he was clad in the skin of a certain animal”—the guanaco, similar to the llama—“which skin was very skillfully sewn together. And this animal has the head and ears as large as a mule’s, and a neck and body like those of a camel, a stag’s legs, and a tail like that of a horse. . . . This giant had his feet covered with the skin of the said animal in the manner of shoes, and he carried in his hand a thick bow, with a thick bowstring, made from the intestines of the said animal, with a bundle of cane arrows which were not very long and were feathered like ours, but no iron point, but, at the tip, small black and white stones.”
Emboldened after the first encounter, Magellan invited the giant on board the flagship, where he offered his guest plentiful “food and drink.” In the midst of their feasting, the Captain General summoned his men to produce a large “steel mirror.”
The reaction was swift and stunning. “The giant, seeing himself, was greatly terrified, leaping back so that he threw four of our men to the ground.” When the mirror was removed, the giant regained his composure. Magellan then tried to win back his guest’s confidence with a gift of trinkets: “two bells, a mirror”—presumably smaller and less alarming—“a comb, and a chaplet of paternosters.” This last item was by far the most significant of all the gifts and no doubt included what is now known as the Lord’s Prayer—in Latin, of course. Magellan probably knew that Jesus taught this prayer to the disciples, and perhaps he expected that the giant would take this prayer back to the Indians. When the feast ended, a guard of four armed men escorted him to shore.
During the feast, another giant had watched the proceedings from land, and as soon as his tribesman returned safely, he tore off in the direction of their concealed huts to convey the news. Slowly, the other giants emerged from the trees to reveal themselves to the crew members, who were astounded by the sight and transfixed by the unexpected appearance of giant women:
“They placed themselves one after the other quite naked and began to leap and sing, raising one finger to the sky, and showing our people a certain white powder made from roots of herbs, which they kept in earthenware pots, and made signs that they lived on that, and that they had nothing to eat but this powder,” Pigafetta wrote. “Whereupon our men made signs to them that they should come to the ships, and that they would help them carry their provisions. Then these men came, bearing only their bows in their hands. But their wives came after them loaded like asses and carrying their goods. And the women are not so tall as the men, but somewhat fatter. When we saw them, we were all amazed and astonished. For they had teats half a cubit long, and they were painted on the face and clad like the men. But they wore a small skin in front to cover their private parts. They brought with them four of those little animals of which they make their clothing”—guanacos—“and led them on a leash with a cord.”
The guanacos intrigued the sailors almost as much as the giants did. The guanacos had adapted to life in this harsh region over thousands of years. Their stomachs contain three compartments to extract protein efficiently from the food they chew, and they have long legs for scrambling up and down steep mountainsides. Magellan’s crew, eager for guanacos of their own, learned from the giants how to capture the animals. The procedure proved surprisingly simple. “They tie one of the young ones to a bush, and thereupon the large ones come to play with the little ones, and the giants hidden behind some ledge kill with their arrows the large ones. Our men took eighteen of these giants, both men and women, whom they divided into parties, half on one side of the port, and the other half on the other, to catch the said animals.”
Within days, the sailors were delighted to have their own guanacos. Their tough, stringy meat provided a welcome alternative to the diet of salted sea elephant, and the guanaco wool, similar in color and texture to a sheep’s, helped the men to endure the rigors of Port Saint Julian.