Basque History of the World (7 page)

Txipiron

Basque fishermen invented ways of cooking inexpensive local catch.
Ttoro
is a dish traditionally prepared by Labourdine fishermen based in towns at the mouth of the Nivelle: St.-Jean-de-Luz, Ciboure, and the village at the harbor entrance, Socoa. It is made from locally available fish, and the recipe varies from cook to cook. The following recipe is from Casinto De Gregorio, a Guipúzcoan who established a cozy little restaurant in St.-Jean-de-Luz in the 1920s. The restaurant, Chez Maya, is still in the family, and the cook, his grandson, Freddy, still uses his
ttoro
recipe.

TTORO
(for six)

Clean the fish. Cut the gurnard in slices. Filet the rascasse. Keep the bones.

Sauté the chopped onions, minced leek, and chopped garlic in olive oil for 15 minutes; add the heads and bones of the fish and cook slowly. Add the tomatoes, crushed, the wine, a quart of water, the bouquet garni, and pepper. Cook 90 minutes.

Clean and open the mussels, adding the juice to the pot.

Strain the liquid.

Flour the fish and sauté for 1 minute in olive oil.

Combine everything and cook slowly for 10 minutes.

Serve in soup bowls with garlic croutons.

Despite their inventive cooks, the Basques did not stay in their little sea, content with its little creatures. What first drove them out farther than the known world was the pursuit of a deadly but profitable giant: the Basque whale.

P
LINY, THE FIRST-CENTURY
Roman naturalist, described whales as creatures that lived off the north coast of Iberia. Until the Basques overhunted them, giant whales, along with porpoises and dolphins, made the Bay of Biscay their winter home.

Several varieties of whale, including the huge sperm whale, could be seen off the rocky coastline. The most valued one has the scientific name
Eubalaena glacialis
, referring to the fact that it spent its summers amid the icebergs, cruising past pale blue glacier faces off Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. When these waters began to freeze for the winter, it would come down to the Bay of Biscay. Some scientists had proposed the Latin name
Balaena euskariensis
after its popular name, the Euskera or Basque whale.

An important feature of the Basque whale was that, like the sperm whale, but unlike many whale species, it floated when dead. The whale’s back shone obsidian black in the water, though the belly was a brilliant white. Averaging about fifty to sixty feet in length, a quarter of which was the huge head, a single animal could weigh more than sixty tons. Such a whale would yield thirty tons of blubber, which could be cooked down to an oil valued for centuries as fuel. Most coastal Basque communities established facilities along their beaches for cooking down whale blubber. As with most things Basque, it is not certain when this oil trade began, but in 670, at the end of the age of the Visigoths, there was a documented sale in northern France by Basques from Labourd of forty pots of whale oil.

Whalebone was also valuable, especially the hundreds of teeth which were a particularly durable form of ivory. The tons of meat were a profitable food item. Whale meat had been eaten by the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians, who probably took beached whales since there is no record of commercial whaling. Romans also wrote of whale meat. Pliny wrote that eating whale meat was good for the teeth.

The first commercial whale hunters were the seventh- and eighth-century Basques, who found an eager market for this meat in Europe. Whale meat became a staple of the European diet partly because the Catholic Church forbade the eating of “red-blooded” meat on holy days—about half the days on the calendar including every Friday—arguing that it was “hot,” associated with sex, which was also forbidden on holy days. But meat that came from animals—or parts of animals—that were submerged in water, including whale, fish, and the tail of the beaver, was deemed “cold” and therefore permitted. So with the exception of beaver tails and the occasional seal or porpoise, whale was the one allowable red meat. The Basques became the great providers of this holy red meat. They sold the leaner meat fresh or preserved in salt. Fattier parts were cured like bacon. In Paris, where these cuts were a lenten specialty, they were known as
craspois
. Tongues, fresh or salted, were regarded as a particular delicacy and served with peas. Being the choicest part, the only good part, according to some medieval writers, whale tongues were often demanded by local church or government officials as tribute. The port of Bayonne jealously guarded its monopoly on the tongue trade.

A beached whale brought to Bayonne in 1728. The caption says that the whale only produced two casks of oil because it had dried out from lying on the shore. (Collection of Charles-Paul Gaudin, St.-Jean-de-Luz)

In the seventh century, the Basques, no longer content to wait for ailing whales to beach themselves, built stone whale-spotting towers along the coast from Bilbao to Bayonne, manning them between October and March. One still remains on a mountaintop near San Sebastián and another in Guéthary in Labourd. The whale’s undoing was the fact that it is a lunged mammal and must rise to the surface to breathe. When it does, a tall column of vapor is released. Spotting the spout of an approaching whale off the coastline, the lookout in the tower would let out a prolonged yell. His shouts were actually coded signals that told whalers the exact type of whale sighted, and whether it was a single whale or in a group. Five oarsmen, a captain, and a harpooner would then row out in a lightweight vessel.

The oarsmen would row as silently as possible, muffling the oars in their locks and even the oar blades in the water with oiled cloth. Then, having sneaked up on the unsuspecting giant foundering along the coast, they would strike suddenly with wooden-handled spears and harpoons. The oarsmen had to row close enough to the whale for the harpooner to plant the harpoon deeply into the body just below the head. Harpooning became the trade of the largest, strongest men. After harpooning the whale, the oarsmen had to row furiously in reverse, turning a fast circle, for an enraged whale could kill a dozen men with a flick of its huge tail. Or, instead of turning on its attackers, the whale might try to dive to the safety of great depths, dragging men and boats with it. The whale would dive with harpoon, line, and buoys until, out of breath, it had to furiously resurface, only to be harpooned again. The process was repeated numerous times until the whale spouted blood and died or the whalers capsized and drowned. Sometimes the boat and fishermen would just sink under the weight of the wet ropes.

Basque whalers. (Collection of Charles-Paul Gaudin, St.-Jean-de-Luz)

By the late thirteenth century, whales marked the town seals of Bermeo and Fuenterrabía. Among the other towns that included whales in their town seals were Biarritz, Hendaye, Guetaria, Motrico, and Lequeitio. Not only did these towns keep the whale on their seals, but, from the use of whaling launches, they developed an early and enduring passion for rowing regattas. The eighteenth-century British are generally credited with having invented this sport on the Thames, but it may be the Basques who originated it. Their first recorded contest, a legendary Mundaka-versus-Bermeo regatta, was in 1719, though they may have held many competitions before that with the fishermen of one town challenging the fishermen of a second town to a twenty-minute race. Even today, the Basque fishing towns compete every summer. The home team rows out to meet the visitors, in launches whose design has not changed in at least three centuries. After holding their oars vertically in a salute, they begin the race.

Harpooning a whale. Shown on a Seal of Motrico, 1507, Municipal Archive of Motrico. (Untzi Museoa, San Sebastián)

I
N THE NINTH CENTURY
, the Basques skirmished with yet another intruder, the Vikings who occupied the banks of the Adour River. The Basques always tried to learn from interlopers, and the Vikings, who had traveled farther by sea than anyone else at that time, became an important influence on Basque seamen. Instead of simply planking a frame, Basque shipbuilders began to use the Viking hull construction, overlapping the edge of planks horizontally and then fastening them with iron rivets.

Better-built ships meant the possibility of longer voyages, but despite the increased seaworthiness of vessels and even improved navigational skills, voyages were only able to last as long as the shelf life of the ship’s provisions. Since most fish are found on continental shelves, a long voyage beyond the European shelf could not be provisioned by catching fresh fish alone. With no refrigeration, food spoilage was the undoing of many voyages beyond coastal zones. By the tenth century, Vikings were able to undertake longer voyages than other people of the time, able to travel between continents, because they provisioned their long journeys through the North Atlantic with cod that had been dried in arctic air. By the late tenth century, a century after leaving the Adour, they were crossing the North Atlantic to North America.