"THERE WERE GIANTS IN THOSE DAYS."
Among many other strange things, our unlettered ancestors believed in
the past existence of those tall fellows, giants (individually, or
even collectively as nations), quite as implicitly as they, worthy
folks, did in the pranks and appearances of contemporary witches and
ghosts; but even among the learned a more than tacit belief in a
defunct class of beings, whose bulk and stature far exceeded those of
common humanity, found full sway until the beginning of the present
century.
A love of the marvellous is strong; and even Buffon, the eminent
naturalist, fell into the old and vague delusion that "there were
giants in those days," and he made the bones of an elephant to figure
as the remains of a man of vast stature.
With Scripture for a basis to their assertions, it was difficult, no
doubt, for the over-learned, and still more for the unlearned, of
past times to subdue their belief in the existence of such foes as
were encountered by our old friend Jack of gallant memory--veritable
giants, tall as steeples, to whom such men as Big Sam of the Black
Watch, O'Brien the Irish giant (whose skeleton is in the museum of
the College of Surgeons), even the King of Prussia's famous
grenadiers, and the girl fifteen years old and more than seven feet
high, "who was presented to their majesties at Dresden,"* were all as
pigmies and Liliputians by comparison.
* _Gentleman's Magazine_, 1753.
The Bible gives us four distinct races of giants, the chief of whom
were the Anakims, or sons of Anak, the people of the chosen land, to
which Moses was to lead the children of Israel, who were unto them
but as grasshoppers in size. Og, the king of this tall race and of
Bashan, however, if judged by the measurement of the present day, was
not taller than eight feet six inches, as his brazen bedstead
measured just nine Jewish cubits; but the Rabbis maintain that the
bed described was only his _cradle_ when an infant. The Anakims are
referred to in the fifth chapter of the Koran, which speaks of
Jericho as a city inhabited by giants. The father of Og is also
asserted to have been of stature so great, that he escaped the Flood
by--_wading_!
When told (as we are) in 1 Samuel that Goliath was in height six
cubits and a span, that his coat of mail weighed five thousand
shekels of brass, that the staff of his spear was as a weaver's beam,
and that its head weighed six hundred shekels of iron, it was
difficult for the simple people of past days, when, in some remote
cavern or river's bed, or fallen chalk cliff, the monster bones of
the elephant, the mastodon, or the rhinoceros came unexpectedly to
light, not to believe that there might have been many Goliaths in the
world once.
Josephus records that in _his_ time there were to be seen in Gaza,
Gath, and Azoth the tombs of those mighty men of old, the sons of
Anak, who had been slain when Joshua marched into the land of Canaan,
and slew the people of Hebron and Dabir.
According to the Moslems, even Joshua was a man of prodigious
stature; and the highest mountain on the shores of the Bosphorus is
at this hour called by the Turks the Grave of Joshua,--_Juscha
Taghi_,--or the Giant's Mountain.*
* The grave is fifty feet long, and has been called the tomb of
Amycus and of Hercules.
Tradition ascribes the origin of the name of Antwerp to a giant whose
abode was in the woody swamps through which the Scheldt then wandered
to the German Sea, and who used to cut off the hands and feet of
those who displeased him; "and to prove this" (vide _Atlas
Geographus_, 1711) "they show there a tooth, which they pretend to be
his. It is a hand's-breadth long, and weighs six ounces. Moreover,
the city has hands cut off as part of its arms."
Giants figure largely among the earlier fables of Wales, Scotland,
and Ireland, the two latter contending still for the nationality of
the famous
"Finn MacCoul,
Wha dung the deil, and gart him yowl,"
and who, by the famous causeway of his own construction, could cross
the Irish Channel to Britain whenever he chose.
Fiannam is probably the same personage. He is said to have lived in
the time of Ewen II. of Scotland, a potentate who, according to
Buchanan, "reigned in the year before Christ 77, and was a good and
civil king;" and local story connects with his name the Giant's
Chair, a rock above the river Dullan, in the parish of Mortlach.
England, too, is not without traces of some interest in the sons of
Anak. We have the Giant's Grave, a long and grassy ridge in the
beautiful Fairy Glen at Hawkstone, in Salop; another place so named
on the coast of Bristol, and a third at Penrith, where two stone
pillars in the churchyard, standing fifteen feet asunder at the
opposite ends of a grave, and covered with runes or unintelligible
carving, mark the size and tomb of Owen Cæsarius. Near these pillars
is a third stone, called the Giant's Thumb.
Two miles below Brougham Castle, on the steep banks of the Eamont,
are two excavations in the rock, having traces of a door and window,
and of a strong column indented with iron; and these caves are
assigned by tradition to a giant, who bore the classic name of Isis.
The vast stature of the Patagonians was long the subject of implicit
belief, until it passed into a proverb. Antonio Pagifeta, who
accompanied the adventurous Ferdinand Magellan on his famous voyage
in 1519, records that on the coast of Brazil they found wild and
gigantic cannibals so nimble of foot, that no man could overtake
them. Bearing on thence to south latitude 49°, the land seemed all
desolate and uninhabited, for they could see no living creature. At
last a giant came singing and dancing towards them, and threw dust on
his head. He was so tall, that the head of a Spaniard reached only
to his waist. His apparel was the skin of a monstrous beast. All
the inhabitants were men of the same kind, wherefore "the admiral
called them Patagons."
This absurd story was corroborated a hundred years later by Jacob le
Maire, in a voyage to the same region, and by the Dutch navigator
Schouten, when they relate that at Port Desire they found graves
containing human skeletons from eleven to twelve feet long. However,
the Spanish officers of Cordova's squadron, by accurate measurements,
reduced the utmost stature of the real Patagonian to seven feet one
and a half inches, and their common height to six feet.
Premising that, of course, the great bones about to be referred to
were those of the mammoth, the mastodon and other antediluvian
animals, perhaps the most amusing instance of the credulity and
gullibility even of the learned in such matters was a _mémoire_, read
seriously to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Rouen, in the middle of
the last century, by a savan named M. le Cat.
Therein he asserted and affected to give proof that Ferragas, who was
slain by Orlando, the nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet in
height; that Isoret, whose tomb lay near the chapel of St. Pierre, in
the suburbs of Paris, had been twenty feet high; and that in the city
of Rouen, when digging near the convent of the Jacobins in 1509,
during the reign of Louis XII., there was found in a tomb of stone a
skeleton, the skull of which would hold a bushel (thirty-eight pounds
weight) of corn. The shin-bones were entire, and measured four feet
long. On this astounding tomb was a plate of copper, bearing the
epitaph, "In this grave lies the noble and puissant Lord Riccon de
Valmont and his bones." He then proceeds to tell us that Valence in
Dauphiné possesses the bones of the giant Buccart, tyrant of the
Vivarais, whom his vassal, the Count de Cabillon, slew by a barbed
arrow, the iron head of which was found in his tomb when it--with all
his bones intact--was discovered in 1705, at the base of the mountain
of Crussol, whereon the giant dwelt, and whence he used to come daily
to drink of the river Merderet. The skeleton when measured was
twenty-two feet six inches long.*
* "In the Dominican Church there's the picture of a giant called
Buard, who they pretend, by his bones dug up in their monastery, was
fifteen cubits high and seven broad."--_Atlas Geographus_, 1711, 4to.
"Father Crozart assured me," continued the veracious M. le Cat, "that
the physicians who were in the train of the princes who passed
through Valence all acknowledged the bones to be human, and offered
twenty-two pistoles for them." He farther appends a copy of the
epitaph of this personage, forwarded to him by the same Father Crozat
in 1746, and beginning, "Hæc est effigiis gigantis Baardi Vivariensis
tiranni in Montis Cressoli Stantis," &c.
This tall personage, a second whose bones were exposed by the waters
of the Rhone in 1456, and a third whose skeleton, nineteen feet long,
was found near Lucerne in 1577, were all jokes and swindle when
compared with others that were found in later years, particularly the
remains of Teutobochus, king of the Teutones, which were discovered
near the ruined castle of Chaumont in Dauphine, in the year 1613, by
some masons who were digging a well. At the depth of eighteen feet,
in light sandy soil, they came upon a tomb built of brick; above it
was a stone inscribed, "Teutobochus Rex." Five years afterwards
Mazurier, a surgeon, published his _Histoire Véritable du Géant
Teutobochus_, which excited keen controversy, and brought all
Paris--the Paris of Louis the Just and of Richelieu--rushing in
crowds to see the bones of the mastodon, or whatever it was, whose
tomb bore a royal inscription.
This king of the Teutones, who is said to have been vanquished and
slain in battle a few miles from Valence, and to have been buried
with all honour by Marius, his conqueror, was carefully measured, and
found to be twenty-five feet six inches long, ten feet across the
shoulders, and five from breast to back-bone. His teeth were each
the size of an ox's foot. All France heard of this with wonder, and
a belief which the anatomist Riolan sought in vain to ridicule and
expose.
Sicily was peculiarly the favourite abode of giants.
At Mazarino, a town near Girgenti, there were found in 1516 the bones
of a giant whose skull was like a sugar-hogshead, with teeth each
five ounces in weight; and in the Val di Mazzara, thirty years after,
the alleged remains of another were found, whose stature was the same!
Patrick Brydone, in his _Tour to Sicily and Malta_, in 1773, mentions
some of these marvellous discoveries.
"In the mountain above it (_il Mar Dolce_) they show you a cavern
where a gigantic skeleton is said to have been found; however, it
fell to dust when they attempted to remove it. Fazzello says its
teeth were the only part that resisted the impression of the air;
that he procured two of them, and that they weighed near two ounces.
There are many such stories to be met with in the Sicilian legends,
as it seems to be a universal belief that this island (Sicily) was
once inhabited by giants; but, although we have made diligent
inquiry, we have never yet been able to procure a sight of any of
those gigantic bones which are said to be still preserved in many
parts of the island. Had there been any foundation for this, I think
it is probable they must have found their way into some of the
museums. But this is not the case; nor indeed have we met with any
person of sense and credibility that could say they have seen them.
We had been assured at Naples that an entire skeleton, upwards of ten
feet high, was preserved in the museum at Palermo; but there is no
such thing there, nor I believe anywhere else in the island."
This Palermitan giant is gravely referred to in the _mémoire_ of M.
le Cat, as well as "another thirty-three feet high, found in 1550."
According to Plutarch, Serbonius had the grave of Antæus (the Libyan
giant and antagonist of Hercules) opened in the city of Tungis, and,
finding his body to be "sixty cubits long, was infinitely
astonished," as well he might be, and gave orders for the tomb to be
closed, but added new honours to his memory. The bones of a giant,
forty-six cubits in length, were laid bare by an earthquake in Crete,
as Pliny states with implicit faith; and it was disputed whether they
were those of Otus, son of Neptune, who built a city in his ninth
year, or of the equally fabulous Orion. But all that we have noted
are overtopped by the giant found at Thessalonica in 1691, who was
ninety-six feet high (as certified by M. Quoinet, consul for France),
and by another found at Trepani, in Sicily--the ancient _Drepanum_.
The latter, Boccaccio states the learned of his time to have taken
for the skeleton of Polyphemus, the son of Neptune and Thoosa--the
one-eyed Cyclop of the _Odyssey_.
"A form enormous! far unlike the race
Of human birth, in stature and in face;"
and on being measured, the bones proved to be exactly _three hundred
feet_ long!