Basque History of the World (17 page)

Fishermen off the coast of Guipúzcoa, 1910. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)

The old commerce, salt cod and whale, was over. The Basques were driven back to whaling in the Bay of Biscay. In the sixteenth century, Basques had landed several hundred whales a year in Newfoundland and Labrador. Between 1637 and 1801, Zarautz, a major whaling town in Guipúzcoa, landed only fifty-five whales from the Bay of Biscay. By 1785, when the Spanish government decided to form a whaling company and sent an emissary to find a Basque harpoonist, he could not find one.

By then, the Basques had found new opportunities in America. New products would be made into Basque fortunes, and the whale would be forgotten. Whales themselves were vanishing from “the Basque Sea.”

T
HE HOT PEPPER
or the bean may be the American product that best shows the Basques’ genius for cooking, but the cocoa pod is the one that reveals their commercial skills. By the end of the seventeenth century, affluent Europeans craved chocolate, were addicted to it, some said. The leading producer of cocoa was the Spanish colony of Venezuela, and the principal purveyors were the Dutch, who, enjoying a near-total monopoly, were able to demand extremely high prices.

In 1728, in yet another example of the confidence and ambition of the Basques, a group of wealthy Guipúzcoans, led by Francisco de Munibe, the count of Peñaflorida, formed a Basque company, the Real Compañia Guipúzcoana de Caracas, the Royal Guipúzcoan Company of Caracas, to compete in the Venezuelan cocoa trade. The seventeenth-century Dutch West India Company had built a trade empire along the Atlantic coasts of Africa and the Americas. The British had established trading companies to dominate North America. If the British and the Dutch could have trading companies dominating sectors of American commerce, why not the Basques?

The company attracted private investors as well as the city of San Sebastián, the province of Guipúzcoa, and even the Spanish crown, which was enthusiastic about the idea of breaking the Dutch cocoa monopoly in a Spanish colony. But it was essentially a Guipúzcoan company. The five directors were required to have San Sebastián residence, and most investors were from the province, as were the majority of sailors.

At first the Real Compañia Guipúzcoana de Caracas struggled to find suppliers and the necessary contacts in Venezuela. The first ships were not sent for two years, until 1730. But once the company secured enough cocoa, it was able to get an ever-increasing share of the world market, and as its business strengthened, so did its standing in Venezuela, until it became the company with which producers sought contracts. Because Basque ports were not in the Spanish customs zone, they could operate like a free zone for trade in the rest of Europe.

This had a huge impact on the Basque economy, especially at the ports of San Sebastián and Pasajes. Stores, warehouses, commercial houses prospered. Shipbuilding boomed, especially in the company’s own shipyard in Pasajes. The Royal Company alone operated forty-eight ships. In the first decade, it paid the investors dividends from 20 to 25 percent.

From cocoa, the Real Compañia Guipúzcoana de Caracas expanded to leather, coffee, and tobacco. It was the company’s shipments of Venezuelan red beans that made them a staple in Tolosa. It also shipped turkeys, which became a mainstay of the Guipúzcoan diet. In 1751, it even tried to bring back whaling, resurrecting the seventeenth-century Compañia de Ballenas de San Sebastián and sending two armed whalers to the South Atlantic and the Pacific. One returned empty, and the other was forced to turn back for repairs.

But the company was not only concerned with bringing goods to San Sebastián and Pasajes. It also sold Basque goods in the colonies. A fundamental concept was that the ships should be full in both directions. It was still a dangerous fifty-to sixty-day crossing. Basque iron products, weapons, chemical products, sardines, and construction wood were shipped to Caracas. Other Basque provinces, and especially Navarra, began to see the opportunity the company offered. Navarrese wine was shipped to Latin America. Other regions of Spain began to do business with the Royal Company. Valencia shipped silk and ceramics; Aragón shipped cotton; Catalonia shipped textiles and manufactured goods. And ports all over Spain received cocoa and other goods from the Royal Company.

In 1751 the company seat was moved to Madrid. But it did not operate as a Spanish monopoly. Its owners were the first pan-Europeans, caring little about the arbitrary borders that split up the continent. At the dawn of capitalism, the Royal Guipúzcoan Company of Caracas became a multinational. Deeply involved in inter-European trade, it had relations with the French, Dutch, and Germans and even operated some ships out of French ports. And French ships brought hams, flour, and other agricultural products to Pasajes to sell to the Royal Company. The company shipped a great quantity of French flour to the Latin American market.

Wanting a share of all profitable commerce of the epoch, the company even attempted to enter the slave trade but, finding the monopolies by European powers in their own Caribbean colonies to be unbreakable, it had to give up this plan.

In 1766, Xabier María de Munibe, the son of one of the founders of the Royal Guipúzcoan Company, founded the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, the Royal Basque Society of Friends of the Country, an eighteenth century think tank that, in addition to studying everything Basque from science and engineering to gastronomy, discussed and promoted the precepts of modern capitalism.

In this new age of capitalism, the Basques were demonstrating what their British contemporary, Adam Smith, would write about decades later. It was Smith’s contention in his 1776 bible of capitalism,
The Wealth of Nations
, that the wealth of a country was not the gold that it held but the goods and services it provided. When Smith was articulating this theory, he took the example of Spain. The nation was in precipitous decline after centuries of trying to enrich itself by extracting wealth, often literally gold, from its Latin American holdings. What Smith, however, did not go on to say—but which illustrates his point exactly—is that while Spain was wasting its energies amassing American gold, the Basques generated affluence throughout the Iberian peninsula by providing goods and services to and from Latin America.

Another lesson in capitalism practiced by the Basques and later espoused by Smith: Having broken the Dutch cocoa monopoly, the Basques caused the price of chocolate to plunge. Far from causing a crisis, the almost halved price made chocolate more accessible and greatly expanded the market, making the trade far more profitable than it had been under Dutch price fixing.

The company produced spin-offs such as the Real Compañia de Habana for trade with Cuba and another for trading with the Philippines. Lasting fifty-six years, the Royal Guipúzcoan Company of Caracas had an enormous impact not only on Basqueland but on Latin America. It greatly facilitated the Basque dream of making a fortune in America, but the prosperity that it brought to Caracas, as well as the unbridled exploitation, also had much to do with the Spanish loss of colonies and the creation of an independent Venezuela. In 1749, a violent uprising against the Royal Guipúzcoan Company erupted in Caracas. To avoid further uprisings, producers were paid better, causing dividends to drop to only 5 to 10 percent.

Ironically, the aspirations of these South American rebels were realized a generation later by the father of Latin American independence, Simon Bolivar, El Libertador, who was born in Caracas in 1783 to a Vizcayan family that had grown wealthy in South America.

But it was in Basqueland itself that unrestrained capitalism and the emergence of a new wealthy class were creating a rift that would lead to more than a century of civil war.

Part Two

THE DAWN OF EUSKADI

The Basques are said with good reason, to be agile and deft and have earned their reputaton of being good shots.

—I
LLUSTRATED
G
UIDE FOR THE
T
RAVELER TO SAN
S
EBASTIÁN
,
1909

The Basques . . . are a religious, deep driking, non-swearing race who live on the mountainous south-eastern shores of the Bay of Biscay. They are profoundly nautical; they swing and fish in the Bay without ever feeling sea-sick.

George Steer
, T
HE
T
REE OF
G
ERNIKA
,
1938
—

The Basque Onomatopoeia

Food is always, more or less, in demand.

—Adam Smith
, T
HE
W
EALTH OF
N
ATIONS
, 1776

FOR THE REST of the world, the little-remembered Carlist Wars were to have only two lasting consequences: the invention of the political term liberal and the popularizing of the beret. These two brutal and complicated nineteenth-century civil wars were to shape the destiny of at least six generations of both Basques and Spaniards. Their enduring impact is most easily seen in features of daily life such as food and clothing. Carlism resulted not only in the famous Basque hat but in the creation of their most mysterious, and therefore some might argue, most Basque sauce.

According to popular and unverified legend, in 1836 a Bilbao salt cod merchant named Gurtubay placed an order by telegram saying, “Send me by the first ship that lands in Bilbao, 100 or 120 top quality salt cods,” which in Spanish was written “
100 o 120 bacaladas
.” The telegraph code was misinterpreted as “
1,000,120 bacaladas
.”

In any event, Gurtubay got a lot more salt cod than he had expected, and had no possibility of returning it, because by then the First Carlist War had begun and Bilbao was under siege. The mistake might have been ruinous had not the city started running out of supplies. As the food shortage became more severe, Bilbaínos became an eager market for Gurtubay’s million dried fish, and Gurtubay became a rich man, which is the way Basques like their stories to end.

It is often said that this is why the people of Bilbao eat so much salt cod, which is probably not true. The Basques, including Bilbaínos, had been eating salt cod since they developed the product many centuries earlier. But a typical salt cod dish of the day was a stew with many ingredients. During the siege, no fresh food could get in to the city, which in time left its inhabitants with little more than three nonperishable staples: olive oil, garlic, and dried pepper.

The First Carlist War, drawn by M. Miranda,
Panarama Español
, Madrid, 1842.

Salt cod cooked in olive oil with slices of dried guindilla pepper and garlic became a popular dish called
pil pil
, though the origin of this name is not clear. The tendency is to assume that this odd-looking term means something in Euskera. Disappointingly, it has no more meaning in that ancient language than it does in Spanish or English. As with the origins of the Basques themselves, explanations abound, ranging from a reference to pelota to the sound of sizzling olive oil. As with many Basque words, the orthography became almost a question of personal preference.
Pil-pil
with a hyphen was often used, and a 1912 book called it
pirpir
, one in 1919 said
pin pin
, and one in 1930 wrote of
pirpil
. The 1892
General Dictionary of Cuisine
published in Madrid defined “pil pill” as “the name of a new red sauce the Bilbaíno gastronomes have invented now to eat with their famous
chipirones
, or squid:” The only explanation for this definition is that it was neither the first nor the last time a Madrid publication got its Basque facts wrong.

All of these variations on the name lend credence to the theory that the word is an onomatopoeia attempting to capture the sound of sizzling olive oil. An 1896 book,
Lexicón Bilbaíno
by Emiliano Arriaga, stated that the dish while cooking made the sound “bil-bil” but that, since there is a tendency to transpose
p
s and
b
s, which he also stated is the origin of the name Bilbao, the sauce became known as “pil-pil.” The only problem then is that pil pil doesn’t go “pil pil” anymore.

At some point later in the century, it was discovered that if the cooked salt cod was placed in an earthen casserole with warm but not at all sizzling oil and garlic, and the casserole was moved in a circular motion over a very low heat, the oil would thicken into a creamy, opaque, ivory-colored sauce.

The people of Bilbao like to say that the chefs of San Sebastián are French influenced, and though this may sound appealing to the outside world, especially the French, it is not intended to be a compliment. But the unpleasant truth is that in the late nineteenth century, Bilbao chefs were developing a number of sauces for their salt cod, because sauces were the fashion in French cuisine.

Nevertheless, this particular sauce was brilliant. Called
ligado
, meaning “bound” or “thickened” in Spanish, it had more craft and more originality—and more mystery—than the older, sizzling, clear-oil pil pil. Today almost no one makes the original pil pil, whereas ligado is considered the litmus test of a Basque chef. But apparently everyone still liked to say “pil pil,” and it has become the name for the thickened, ligado sauce.