Basque History of the World (8 page)

The Atlantic cod, a white-fleshed bottom feeder of the North Atlantic that was unknown in the waters off northern Iberia, has almost no fat, which enables it to preserve unusually well. The Basques refined the curing process by not only drying but first salting the cod, as they did with whale meat. Because cod were found in the northern summer whale grounds, the same rowboats that were launched from ships to chase whale were also used to fish cod. These Basque boats were the origin of the fishing dory that was later used in the North American cod fishery by most Atlantic fishing nations until the 1950s.

The Basques had extended their range in pursuit of the whale from the Bay of Biscay, across the northern coast to Galicia. But by pursuing northern cod, and provisioning their ships with salt cod, they then were able to start chasing the whale into its summer grounds, up to Iceland, Norway, the Hebrides, and the Faeroes.

By the year 1000, whales that had returned to safe northern waters, the snort of their spray echoing in silent fjords, were suddenly being pounced on by Basques, who had sailed more than 1,000 miles to hunt them down. The dangerous business became even more deadly with the move to subarctic waters where a fisherman, tossed into the icy water, would die in minutes. But long-distance whaling had the advantage that it avoided tributes demanded by local government and church, tributes which sometimes included the tongues, and often the entire first whale of the season or a strip from head to tail. Such tributes were inhibiting whaling. In 1334, to redress the declining fishing population of Lequeitio, Alfonso XI of Castile declared a five-year period during which whalers of that port were taxed a tribute of only one in eighteen whales, instead of the usual one in fifteen. In 1498, the whalers of Labourd rebelled and refused to pay the tongues demanded as tribute by the cathedral in Bayonne. But at times a more effective escape from tributes was to go far away to unknown corners of the globe, where their catch could not be easily monitored.

Salted and dried Basque cod lasted better than the Vikings’ dried product and, through soaking, restored to something resembling a piece of fish. The dried Viking fish felt like a piece of balsa wood. To prepare it, the cook would break it into chips with a hammer. With salt cod, called
bacalao
in Spanish or
maikalao
in Euskera, the Basques further enhanced their whaling fortunes. While fresh fish was easily spoiled and expensive, the Basques had a cheap, long-lasting food for peasants—even inland peasants—that was Church-approved for holy days and that, unlike whale, seemed to be in inexhaustible supply. The Basques were so successful at marketing this product far from the fish’s northern range that in Basqueland, Catalonia, Mediterranean France, Italy, Greece, North Africa—throughout the Mediterranean region—this northern import has remained a traditional food.

The Basques gradually became not only the world’s purveyors of whale and cod products but the leading shipbuilders, pilots, and navigators. Capitalists before capitalism, Basques financed most of their shipbuilding through private venture capital. Typically, a single ship would have three or four investorowners. Under the most common Basque contract, the crew worked for one-third of the profits. Basque ships, large and beamy and known for their exceptionally large hold capacity, were sought after by Europe’s maritime peoples.

Shipyards emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries over the entire Basque coast from Bilbao, where the extensive waterfront of the Nervión River afforded many sites, to the fishing villages and riverfronts of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Labourd, all the way up to Bayonne. Villages with populations of a few hundred were producing what were considered the best ships in the world. Pasajes, a Guipúzcoan whaling port near San Sebastián with a village-sized population crowded onto a single street between the long waterfront and the steep mountains, developed some of the finest port facilities of the fifteenth century. Basqueland had not only the harbors but the iron fields and oak forests for this industry.

A nineteenth-century view of Pasajes.

Basques built all kinds of ships: fishing, whaling, merchant, and warships. In 1505, a Basque General of the Fleet, Juan Lope de Lazcano, commissioned a ship with metal plating on the ribs; the precursor by centuries of ironclad warships. In 1543, a Basque engineer, Blasco de Garay, showed Carlos I a new idea: a ship powered by a giant wheel that was moved by vapor from boiling water. Though Carlos had a great interest in inventions, he was unimpressed with this one, and the idea was ignored for centuries, until the late-eighteenth-century dawn of the industrial revolution.

Maritime skill and engineering innovations were supported by legal prowess. In 1351, the Vizcayan fishing port of Bermeo signed a treaty with Edward III of England that was the first international accord to establish the principle of freedom of the high seas.

ONE OF THE GREAT
Basque mysteries is: When did Basque whalers and codmen first reach North America? Although the pre-Columbian journeys of the Vikings are described in the Icelandic sagas, for centuries such anecdotal evidence was dismissed as legend, myth, or exaggeration. Then in 1961 the remains of eight Viking-built turf houses dating from A.D. 1000 were found in Newfoundland in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. The Basques also left a trail of tales and myths but no physical evidence that they were in North America at an early date. Some have even speculated that the Basques were there before the tenth-century Vikings, a claim with very little basis. The more widely believed and more carefully reasoned theory is that the Basques arrived in North America, along the Newfoundland or Labrador coast, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, that they visited, perhaps with some regularity, perhaps even had people working there, substantially before John Cabot’s 1497 “discovery” of Newfoundland and Christopher Columbus’s 1492 Caribbean find.

Throughout the century leading up to Columbus’s and Cabot’s celebrated voyages, widespread rumors persisted, especially among fishermen and maritime people, that Basque fishermen had found “a land across the sea,” perhaps only an island. The Bretons even attempted to follow Basque fishermen.

In the early fifteenth century, many Europeans believed that two ships from Guipúzcoa, one captained by Juan de Echayde and the other by Matais de Echeveste, had reached land across the Atlantic at the end of the previous century.

But no physical evidence has been found of the Basques in North America before Cabot. Historians and archeologists who have searched for it and failed insist that the rumors are false. But the search for pre-Columbian Basques in America has yielded ample evidence of a surprisingly large-scale Basque presence in Newfoundland and Labrador soon after Cabot. The remains of extensive Basque whaling stations dating to 1530 have been found. It is now thought that by the 1560s the Basque population may have been as high as 2,000, and yet, until 1976, no physical proof of this had been found either.

Jacques Cartier saw Basques in abundance on his voyage of discovery thirty-seven years after Cabot. And Basque journals record seeing Cartier. Few of Cartier’s place-names from the Gulf of St. Lawrence side of Newfoundland have survived because fishermen continued to use bastardized Basque names. Bonne Bay comes from the Basque name
Baya Adhere
, Beautiful Bay; Ingornachoix Bay comes from the Basque name
Aungura Charra
, Bad Anchorage; and Port-au-Choix from
Portuchoa
, Small Port. In 1594, Bristol merchant Sylvester Wyet observed that of sixty fishing ships in Newfoundland’s Bay of Placentia, eight were Spanish and the rest were Basque.

The two leading arguments for placing the Basques in pre-Columbian America are both based on deductive reasoning. The first is their catch. The Basques landed enormous quantities of cod and whale products throughout the Middle Ages. And yet their fourteenth-century competitors were convinced that the known fishing grounds alone could not explain the number of cod they brought to European markets. After Cabot, when Newfoundland and Labrador grounds became widely known, it could be seen that these were the principal Basque whale and cod grounds. Was that not the case before Cabot as well?

The second deductive argument is the improbability that the best sailors, with the best ships, the best navigators, and a tradition of sailing the longest distances could have missed North America during centuries of clearly being so close. There is evidence of the Basques in the Faeroe Islands as early as 875. This was a 1,500-mile journey, which, if they did not make landfall along the way, was a remarkably long distance to sail at that time. Is it possible that in all the following six centuries, working in the narrow area of the North Atlantic where the continents are not far apart, having known and learned from the Vikings, that the Basques never ventured the relatively shorter distance to North America? In 1412, an Icelandic account records that twenty Basque whalers passed by the western tip of Iceland off Grunderfjord, which is a 500-mile crossing to Greenland. From there another 1,200-mile voyage would have taken them to Newfoundland, or a much shorter crossing would have taken them to the northern Labrador coast. The total crossing from the Faeroes to Newfoundland is not much farther than from San Sebastián to Iceland. Most fishermen had little reason to cross the Atlantic, since the catches vanish with the end of the European continental shelf and do not pick up until the other side. But the Basques chased whales that traveled to subarctic waters and then dropped down along both the European and American coastlines.

Numerous reports claim that when Cabot and other early explorers arrived in North America, they encountered native tribesmen who spoke Basque. In other accounts, the tribesmen and the Basques learned and intermingled each other’s languages. In the sixteenth century, there was much speculation about the relationship between indigenous North American languages and Euskera. Esteban de Garibay used this as evidence that both North America and Basqueland were homes to survivors of the Flood. According to accounts from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including those of Peter Martyr, cleric of the court in Barcelona, who reported on the early discoveries, the tribesmen encountered by Cabot were already using the word
baccallaos
. Even if this were true, however, they did not necessarily learn the word from the Basques. In this period the Basque word for cod had numerous variations in different dialects of Euskera, including
bacallau, bakaillo, makaillo
, and
makallao
. According to one theory, the word
bacalao
was originally Euskera and comes from the Euskera word
makila
, which means “stick.” The cod were cured on sticks, and the Scandinavian word for dried cod,
stockfish
, has the same derivation, with
stock
meaning “pole.” But other linguists point out that Euskera frequently converts
b
to
m
when adopting foreign words, and the word
makallao
was probably borrowed from Spanish, Catalan, or Portuguese. The tribesmen could have learned the word from any of these languages. The critical issue is: When did they learn it?

A St.-Jean-de-Luz merchant wrote in 1710, some 150 years after the fact, that when the French were first exploring the rivers of Nouvelle France, they found indigenous people already speaking a patois that was part indigenous and part Euskera. There were many accounts that the indigenous language “had come to be half Basque.”

It has even been suggested that some indigenous words appear to be of Basque origin. The local name for deer is
orein
, which also is the Basque word. Pierre Lhande-Heguy, who became the first secretary of the Basque Academy of Language when this institute was established in 1918, observed a remarkable Basqueness in proper names of the Huron’s language. Among the Huron names that suggested Basque origin to him were the men’s names Anonatea, Arhetsi, Ochelaga, Ahatsistari, Andekerra, and Oatarra and the women’s names Arenhatsi and Ondoaskoua. But the similarity could be a coincidence, and some historians who concede an Euskera influence on local languages argue that it could have happened after 1497 when Newfoundland became known and a large Basque presence there was well documented. If so, the difficult language was assimilated in only a few years.

On the other hand, if the Basques had been in America for decades, possibly centuries before Columbus, why would there be no record of it? Some say, as is always said about the Basques, that they keep secrets. But the real answer might lie not in the nature of Basques but in the nature of fishermen. When fishermen find an unknown ground that yields good catches, they go to great lengths to keep their secret. In most fishing communities, there are boats with notably better catches, and the crews are silent about the location of their grounds. The cod and whale grounds off the coast of North America was a secret worth keeping, the richest grounds ever recorded by European fishermen.

A
NOTHER SIGN THAT
Basque fishermen preceded explorers is the fact that when the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Age of Exploration unfolded, the Spanish and Portuguese turned to Basque ships and mariners because the Basques were considered the people with experience. The Basques hunted voraciously and traveled restlessly. As the world became better known, Basque whalers were found everywhere. They were seen whaling off the coast of Brazil, far north in the Arctic, and down to the Antarctic. Many of the early European ships that explored Africa, America, and Asia were built by Basques and often piloted by Basques as well.