Giants in Patagonia

Image credit www.naturalheightgrowth.com.

The word "Patagonia" - which is, in case anyone was unaware, a South American region near Chile and Argentina - actually comes from the name of a (sort-of) cryptid.
The "cryptids" in question are the Patagons, a supposedly mythical race of giants. Technically, a lost race of people are still cryptids, since humans are animals - a race of giants can still qualify as "animals whose existence is disputed".

Patagons are considered hoaxes by todays scientists. Wikipedia, the always-reliable source of 100% completely unbiased hard facts, especially when it comes to cryptozoology, claims that the existence of Patagons was "substantially debunked" at the end of the 18th century. Yet the people who claimed to have seen the Patagons, sailors from the 16th to 18th centuries, seemed very convinced that they were real people. Why do we have the right to put their stories down as lies, when they've consistently been proven right before?

The first stories of Patagons came from Antonio Pigafetta, one of the only survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's ill-fated attempt at a trip around the world, in the 1520s. Pigafetta claimed that the crew had seen a giant native, so large that they only reached his waist, and made peace with him. He believed they were from the sky. According to Pigafett, Magellan had named the man a "Patagon". "Patagonia", as the land became known, was from then on described as a region of giants.

From then until the late 18th Century, more reports of giant Patagonians came in, with a crewman of Sir Walter Raleigh claiming to have met one. In 1766, the stories were "substantially debunked" when Commondore John Byron wrote of meeting six foot six inch natives in Patagonia. From then on, people seemed to start believing that these were the giants, and that the earlier accounts had been exaggerations., and modern scientists claim that the giants were likely either Tehuelches or outright hoaxes.

Certainly, it is clear that there are no giants in Patagonia today: unless they are hiding in the wooded areas, it seems impossible to think that such large people could go unnoticed, even in a place as "sparsely populated", as Wikipedia puts it, as Patagonia. But why should they not have existed in bygone centuries? Are we really prepared to dismiss the claims made by some of these truly great men as nothing but lies?