Patagon

[2] The first mention of these people came from the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan and his crew, who claimed to have seen them while exploring the coastline of South America en route to the Maluku Islands in their circumnavigation of the world in the 1520s.

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.

It is now understood that the name comes from a character in Primaleón, a very popular 1512 Spanish chivalric romance novel, a type of fiction said to be widely read by Magellan and his conquistador colleagues.

[1] In 1766, a rumour leaked out upon their return to Great Britain that the crew of HMS Dolphin, captained by Commodore John Byron, had seen a tribe of 9-foot-tall (2.7 m) natives in Patagonia when they passed by there on their circumnavigation of the globe.

However, when a newly edited revised account of the voyage came out in 1773, the Patagonians were recorded as being 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m)—very tall, especially by 18th century standards, but by no means giants.