BIGGLES - CHARTER PILOT

by Captain W. E. Johns

VII THE ADVENTURE OF THE PATAGONIAN GIANTS (Pages 62 - 72)

“The news seems to be pretty gloomy,” remarked Flying Officer Henry Harcourt, switching off the mess radio and turning away from the instrument. Ginger remarks how some people are never satisfied. “The trouble is they don’t think. In fact, taking it all round, the human race is a queer mixture of contradictions”. Ginger goes on to add “People will always believe what they want to believe; conversely, they scoff at anything they don’t like. When sailors first came home and said they had seen fishes flying in the air, people laughed. Nobody believed it. Yet those same people would wouldn’t believe that a fish could fly were quite willing to believe the clever rougues (This typing error appears in ALL Oxford editions but was corrected for the three paperback editions) who walked about the country professing to be able to tell fortunes. The same with some of these yarns I’ve been telling you about Dr. Duck. Who, outside this mess, would believe them? You probably wouldn’t believe them yourselves but for the fact that Biggles and Algy are here to bear me out”. Ginger remarks how some people are willing to pay five shillings for a bottle of coloured water guaranteed to cue all ills “just because some quack says so”. When Taffy Hughes asks him if he doesn’t believe in patent medicines, Gingers says he once nearly started in business in that line himself. He is laughed at. Ginger says he once had his hands on a kind of medicine that would give you the strength of ten men. “On the label of my bottles I was going to have a picture of a fellow tossing an elephant into the air, and underneath the slogan, ‘Every Man His Own Samson’,” says Ginger. But the problem with it was you broke everything you touched and it made you grow. Bertie asks Ginger where all of this happened and Ginger replies Patagonia, where they were looking for the Patagonian giants. Ginger says it’s a long story. “Never mind. We’ve nothing to do unless Jerry comes over. Tell us about it”. Ginger then proceeded with the narrative:

Ginger tells the story of how Dr. Duck wanted to investigate a race of giants who were believed to have lived in Patagonia. Ginger says that if you sail to the southern tip of South America, round Cape Horn and go up the pacific side it was said there was a race of giants. “Scores of people saw these giants, and in a good many official log-books we find descriptions of them”. Ginger says this is a cold and miserable place. Flying down and landing on the coast, our heroes have enough petrol for three fairly extensive survey flights. It is whilst exploring on the third such flight that our heroes suffer engine trouble (a blocked petrol lead that is later fixed) which brings them down on a narrow strip of water. "It was a rotten landing - one of the few times I've seen Biggles slip up. But he's only human after all, and I reckon anyone would have made the same boob". They pull onto a shingle beech and find a race of giants with an average height of nine feet. “Behind them were a lot of square cut holes in the face of the cliff from which they had evidently emerged”. Going ashore, one of the giants grabs Donald’s camera and accidently breaks it (before he can take any photographs). One giant, called Amos, speaks English. The giants are hospitable and feed our heroes soup made from moss and fresh water mussels. It tastes awful, but it makes Ginger feel as light as a feather and he finds he can easily bend a screwdriver. Dr. Duck examines some of the giant’s tribal treasures and finds pages out of an old sea log-book. “The writing was early English, with a lot of Norman-French and Latin mixed up with it. There was a crude chart, lettered in Spanish, which bore the date 1381”. (Dr. Duck gets first-hand information – is the illustration on page 71). He speculates that these people's ancestors were ship wrecked in Patagonia long before Columbus discovered America in 1492. The giants have no idea of their origin. The next morning our heroes find that they are too big for their clothes. Ginger says “I burst all my buttons. It was a most uncomfortable feeling. Not realizing our strength, we began do silly things. I put my foot through the starboard plane. Biggles nearly tore the joystick out by the roots testing the controls. We smashed everything we touched. As a result, we had a committee meeting and decided that we should have to be very careful”. They leave, taking samples of the moss and mussels but they turn putrid before they get home. The effects of the soup wear off and our heroes return to normal strength and size. The following summer, Ginger says they went back after chartering a big flying boat only to discover that the cliff in which the houses of the giants were built had collapsed in one enormous landslide, filling the entire valley. There wasn’t even a place to land. Clearing it would have been impossible. Ginger yawned and looked up. “Well, that’s all. I’m going for a stroll to get a spot of fresh air. Anyone coming?”