↑ Antonio Pigafetta, Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo, 1524: "Il capitano generale nominò questi popoli Patagoni." The original word would probably be in Magellan's native Portuguese (patagão) or the Spanish of his men (patagón). It has been interpreted later as "big foot" but the etymology refers to a literary character in a Spanish novel of the early 16th century (see text).
↑ Fondebrider, Jorge (2003). "Chapter 1 – Ámbitos y voces". Versiones de la Patagonia (in Spanish) (1st edition ed.). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Emecé Editores S.A. p. 29. ISBN950-04-2498-3.CS1 maint: Unrecognized language (link) CS1 maint: Extra text (link)
↑ Robert Silverberg (2011). "The strange case of the Patagonian giants". Asimov's Science Fiction. To the voyagers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the average height of an adult European male was just over five feet [1.55 meters], the Patagonians surely must have looked very large, as, to any child, all adults seem colossal. Then, too, an element of understandable human exaggeration must have entered these accounts of men who had traveled so far and endured so much, and the natural wish not to be outdone by one’s predecessors helped to produce these repeated fantasies of Goliaths ten feet tall or even more.
