Basque History of the World (16 page)

It was the Inquisition that ruined the Spanish monopoly on chocolate confection. During the sixteenth century the Portuguese had quietly discovered chocolate making in Brazil, but they were not sharing their discovery with the rest of Europe either. However, Jews, driven to Portugal by the Inquisition, learned the craft while there. From Portugal, the Jews migrated to Bayonne—St. Esprit, the ghetto across the river and out of Basqueland.

The fame of the Jewish chocolate makers of St. Esprit spread throughout both sides of Basqueland and into the rest of France. At first the town fathers thought chocolate making was a low and immoral trade and barred it from Bayonne proper. But the chocolate makers were already barred from the city because they were Jews. Those who wanted the evil chocolate went to St. Esprit. After the French Revolution guaranteed Jews the full rights of citizenship, Jews moved into town, and the city of Bayonne has been boasting of its “Bayonne chocolates” ever since.

In the 1970s, Robert Linxe, a native of Bayonne, became one of the leading chocolate makers of Paris, founding the Maison du Chocolate. He offered this recipe from his native city:

Take 1 liter of heavy cream and bring it to a boil. Pour it slowly over 3 pounds 12 ounces of semibitter chocolate until the chocolate melts. Whisk it like mayonnaise until thickened. Add 3 1/2 ounces of softened, high-quality butter.
    
Remove pits from Itxassou cherries and put the cherries through a food mill until a fine pulp is produced. Heat the pulp, add a little alcohol (brandy or local fruit alcohol), and reduce the liquid. Incorporate in the chocolate mixture. Chill it. Then cut it in pieces and dip in melted
couverture
(covering chocolate). That’s a bit difficult. But you can always shape it into balls and roll them in cocoa powder as truffles.
    
[Linxe sometimes mixes this filling with citrus juices from Spain and forms it into little flat rectangles that he hand-dips in dark satiny chocolate. He calls his creation an
Arnéguy
.]

T
HE BASQUES GROUND
the cocoa beans with a stone roller against a stone block, the metate. The tool, a copy of the ones used by the Aztecs, remained the Basque way of grinding chocolate until into the twentieth century. Perhaps it remained in use because it was so much like a Basque tool: chunky, made of rough-hewn stone, either unadorned or with very simple ornamentation. From prehistoric ruins, to early grave markers, to ancient and enduring tools, to the huge cornerstones on houses, to the modern sculpture of Eduardo Chillida and Jorge de Oteiza, massive, rough-hewn stone has always been the Basque look. “
Bai./Harri eta herri
,” Yes./The stone and the people, wrote the Basque poet Gabriel Aresti. Kneeling and leaning over a rough stone metate, grinding husked beans, just as the Aztecs had done for pre-Columbian millennia, became a part of Basque life.

Metate

A
FEW
A
MERICAN
products were rejected. “Not very good” was the judgment of Antonio Pigafetta, who sampled cassava on Magellan’s voyage. The Basques, like other Europeans, were cautious about eating roots and tubers. The Arawak taught Columbus to make bread from grated cassava root, but Spaniards and Basques yearned for wheat. Perhaps they were put off by the fact that a poison had to be extracted from cassava before it was edible, and that the Caribs who attacked them poisoned their arrow tips by dipping them in cassava juice.

The potato did not get any better reception. Peruvians who introduced potatoes to Pizarro lessened their appeal by leaving them to dehydrate on brown bald mountaintops above the timberline, which produces bland and blackish things called
chuños
. Today, Peruvians still mystify outsiders by savoring such potatoes. But even fresh, these dull-colored, irregular lumps did not look promising. Europeans believed that the physical appearance of food indicated hidden properties. Red food cured anemia but caused lust, which led to the Friday ban on red meat. Walnuts enhanced intelligence because they resembled the brain. The potato, it was reasoned, caused leprosy.

Neighboring Galicians were the only ones in Iberia to be excited when the new discovery was brought back to Spain by Pizarro’s men in 1539. They popularized it in Italy but nowhere in Spain. Even after most Europeans had given in and were eating potatoes, though still feeding corn only to pigs, the Basques were doing just the reverse. Basques do not seem to like any tubers. They feed turnips to pigs and seldom eat beets. In 1783, a Bayonne chemist wrote to Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, the French nutritionist who finally persuaded his country to eat potatoes, informing him that the Basques eat corn, not potatoes, and “no province produces healthier, more vigorous people.” The Basques of Alava were broad bean eaters before American beans had arrived, and it was taken as a sign of their Castilianization, along with the decline in the Euskera speaking there, that they tended to replace broad beans with potatoes rather than American beans. Nevertheless, the Basque pejorative for an Alavan,
babazorro
, broad bean eater, has endured. Alava aside, it was only in the 1940s, during a time of famine following the Civil War, that the potato became a common food in the rest of Basqueland.

A
CCORDING TO A
popular story, potatoes were introduced to Ireland when some washed ashore from ships of the Spanish armada, blown off course and wrecked on shoals. The story is probably not true because the men of the armada, being predominantly Basque, would not have provisioned with potatoes.

By the late sixteenth century, armadas, fleets of warships, were usually crewed by Basques. Many of the ships of the 1588 Spanish armada that headed for England were Basque whaling vessels requisitioned by Felipe II. One of the commanders, Miguel de Oquendo y Dominguez de Segura, was a Basque from San Sebastián who had begun as a shepherd and then worked his way up at sea as a shipwright. A second commander, Martines de Recalde y Larrinaga, was a Basque shipbuilder.

Martines de Recalde managed to make his way back from the debacle but died of exhaustion soon after. Oquendo, after a long struggle, arrived back in Pasajes with a few surviving ships, including his own
Santa Ana
, said to be one of the finest ships of the epoch. He also died of exhaustion a few days later.

The Spanish defeat by British gunners in the English Channel was not as decisive a blow as is often thought today. The battle gave the British confidence and weakened that of the Spanish, but it did not alter the naval balance of power, which had already favored the British because they had better gunners. The engagement simply destroyed the myth of Spanish naval power. The Spanish quickly rebuilt their fleet, but so many Basque fishing vessels had been lost that Guipúzcoan long-distance fishing was diminished for a decade.

As wars and treaties reduced fishing and whaling opportunities, the cultivation of corn provided work and drew many maritime Basques into the landed rural life. By the seventeenth century, growing corn, a crop that easily adapted to the mediocre farming conditions of Basqueland, became so profitable that it was thought to be creating a manpower shortage in the fisheries.

It was a hard life onboard Basque ships. Cod fishermen worked months off the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, while whalers went to the Davis Straits between Greenland and Baffin Island. They navigated around uncharted shoals and icebergs, rode out gales, chopped ice off the windward rigging to keep from capsizing. As with all professions of hardship and danger, a distinctive machismo developed. It was considered cowardly to “waste” deck space by stocking lifeboats. Basques in home port would wear a ring-and-chain gold earring to indicate that they had fished a spring-to-fall cod campaign in Newfoundland.

Adding to the danger was the Basques’ peculiar status as an unrecognized nation. Basques pursued their far-flung fishery during centuries in which the French and Spanish were repeatedly at war with each other and with the Dutch and British. While French and Spanish warships were squaring off on the high seas, Basque fishermen, some from French ports such as Biarritz, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Ciboure, and Hendaye, and others from Spanish ports such as Fuenterrabía, Pasajes, and Bermeo, were shipping out together, speaking their common language, in pursuit of whales and cod and the enormous profits they brought. They had little interest in the affairs of France and Spain.

But no one else saw it that way.

The Dutch and British navies attacked and sank Basque fishing boats on their way to and from the North. In 1625, the Compañia de Ballenas de San Sebastián was formed. This San Sebastián Whaling Company built an armed fleet of forty-one ships with 248 rowing skiffs and 1,475 fishermen. But the British continued to seize Basque fishing boats in Canadian waters and force the fishermen into what amounted to slave labor. When the Danish navy could find Basque ships off Iceland and Norway, it would expel them from those waters. As the North Atlantic opened up and became more competitive, North American fishing was increasingly difficult for the nationless Basques. Their 1351 treaty that established the principle of freedom of the high seas had been long forgotten. St.-Jean-de-Luz fishermen turned to the French government, which based four heavily armed warships in their port to protect Basque fishermen going to and returning from North America. In the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish, hoping to destroy French competition for Newfoundland cod, began attacking French Basque ships. Heavily armed ships out of St.-Jean-de-Luz began defending their fishermen. Eventually these ships, Corsaires, became privateers, operating independently but harassing Spanish ships in the service of France. Basque mariners were increasingly being separated into French and Spanish camps.

Spain regarded Basque maritime skills as a valuable strategic commodity to be controlled by the crown. In 1501 the Spanish crown had prohibited Basques from building ships for other nations. The same measure was tried again in 1551. The crown also declared it a capital crime for a fisherman to serve on a foreign ship.

But in 1612, England’s King James I petitioned the Spanish crown to allow Basques to go to England and teach whaling. The first British whaling fleet was established with six Basque officers under contract. The Dutch also recruited Basques, who defied threats by Madrid of both the death penalty and confiscation of all property.

The Basques would have done well to have obeyed the Spanish crown. Instead, by the seventeenth century, the Basques had lost their monopoly on whaling. Once numerous countries had fleets, the European powers gained control of the whaling grounds.

Then, in 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht dealt a blow to the Basque long-distance fishing fleets, from which they never recovered. This treaty, ending the war known in Europe as the War of Spanish Succession and in the Americas as Queen Anne’s War, attempted to give something to each power. The Bourbons got to keep Spain. The Hapsburgs were given smaller nations to make up for the Bourbon victory. The British gained control of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia at the expense of the French, who were only compensated with limited fishing rights.

The result was that the Basques lost access to Canadian waters. They argued for historic fishing rights as the discoverers of the continent and the first to fish it. But power politics, not right of discovery, mattered in the Utrecht negotiations. The Basques who lived in France could use the limited French fishing grounds, but if they were from Spanish ports, as most Basque fishermen were, they had nothing. The king of Spain, having won Spain, did not have to be offered fishing concessions.

But in the long view of Basque history, a more important outcome of the war was that the Basques saved their homeland. The Bourbons, more than previous monarchs, wanted central power over their Iberian realm. They stripped Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragón of their regional privilege. But unlike these provinces, the Basque provinces and Navarra had supported the Bourbons in the War of Spanish Succession and, at this critical era in the formation of Spain, the Basques were allowed to keep their Fueros.