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The Ancient Patagones
“... One day out of the blue we saw a man, of gigantic proportions, who was naked on the shore, singing, dancing and throwing powder on his head”.
These are the words of Antonio Pigafetta, a sailor from Genoa on the Magellan expedition who for the first time (in 1521) described the encounter with the peoples who would become known as the Patagonians (and the first person who called them this was none other than the captain Magellan who forcibly attempted to bring two back to king Carlos V, but the two men died during the voyage…). The origin of this name however is debatable: according to some it means “big feet”; according to others it derives from a late medieval novel, Primaleòn, in which there is a strange creature called Patagòn.
Tall and enormous (the region was called Terra Gigantum on sixteenth century maps) according to historians the natives described by the Europeans belonged to the Tehuelche people. They were nomads who subsisted by hunting guanaco (a wild Llama) and ostriches. In the following centuries they went through a period of “assimilation”, as it would be called today: on one side, from the Spanish and more generally from the successive waves of European immigration; on the other, from the Chilean Mapuche (or Araucans) who migrated into Patagonia from the eighteenth century spreading their culture and norms.
(19/10/2005)
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