Maine’s First Fishermen

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This description, written by Lewy D’Abartiague, from his On the Origin of Basques, published in 1896, and quoted by Kurlansky at the start of this book, gives a sense of the mystery of the Basques, whose land straddles the borders of Spain and France on the Atlantic’s Bay of Biscay, or the Basque Sea. What it doesn’t begin to do is describe their many contributions to society. The Basques were the mariners of the world. Basque sailors manned the ships of the great explorers, and the men of the Spanish Armada were predominately Basque. Pablo Picasso made one of his most famous paintings, Guernica, about the fascist massacre of Basques at Gernika in the Spanish Civil War. But it took an American, Mark Kurlansky, who has written so compellingly about cod and salt, to give us the entire story of the Basque people and their culture.

Throughout the book, he makes clear his respect and admiration for the Basque people. John Adams, our own second president, put it succinctly. Referring to Boston’s early trade with Bilbao, a Spanish Basque center of commerce, Adams wrote, “While their neighbors have long since resigned all their pretensions into the hand of Kings and priests, this extraordinary people have preserved their ancient language, genius, laws, government and manners, without innovation, longer than any other nation of Europe.”

Basque laws, or Fueros, their codified legal customs, governed the way the people lived early on, and the laws were more reasonable for their time than those of other European countries. It’s hard to believe that the framers of the U. S. Constitution were not influenced by them.

The Basques have also given us clothing: think berets and espadrilles; seafood dishes based on their invention, salt cod; and sports such as jai alai, or pelotte. Most important to those interested in maritime history, however, are Basque contributions to small boat construction and to the whale and cod fisheries.

The French may boast drawings of deer, bison, and wooly mammoths at the Lascaux caves, but during the same period, the Paleolithic, the walls of the Spanish Basque caves in the provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúz-coa show drawings of fish that have since been identified as sea bream. The Basques were fishing 12,000 years ago. Shells and fish bones found in caves attest to fish consumption.

“The first commercial whale hunters were the seventh- and eighth-century Basques,” writes the author. No one knows how early they started whaling: the Basques’ language, Euskera, was not a written one; consequently, the only records we have are those kept by others. “The first accounts of them,” Kurlan-sky writes, “two centuries after the Romans arrived in 218 B.C., give the impression that they were already an ancient – at least not a new people.” The author notes the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians ate the meat of whales washed up on beaches and that Pliny found whale meat good for the teeth. “As with most things Basque,” he continues, “It is not certain when [the] oil trade began, but in 670, at the end of the reign of the Visigoths, there was a documented sale in France by Basques from Labourd for forty pots of whale oil.”
In the ninth century the Vikings appeared in Basque territory, and the Basques, shrewd fishermen that they were, learned from them. They applied Viking boat construction to their plank-on-frame boats, overlapping the edges of planks and fastening them with iron rivets, thus creating the first lapstrake construction on whaling boats they launched from their whaleships.

Basque whaleboats became used for fishing cod, and, the author states, “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.” (Unchanged, too, were the Basque harpoons and lances later used by Nantucket and New Bedford whalemen.)

Because of improved ship construction, Basque whalers were able to travel farther afield, and in chasing whales into their summer grounds off Iceland, Norway, the Hebrides and Faeroes, discovered the cod fisheries in the North Atlantic.

“The Basques gradually became not only the world’s purveyors of whale and cod products,” Kurlansky writes, “but the leading shipbuilders, pilots, and navigators.”

The Vikings had provisioned their vessels with codfish dried in Arctic air. The Basques went them one better. Because they used salt to preserve whale meat, they applied that same method to preserve their catches of cod before drying it. Rather than, as the Vikings did, attack their dried cod with hammers to break off pieces that probably tasted about as good as hardtack, the Basques reconstituted their dried, salted fish by soaking it in water until it was palatable, and called the result bacalao, recipes for which are still used today.

In all his books Kurlansky includes recipes. This book features recipes for dishes made with salt cod, including Pil pil, which features the uniquely Basque way of building a creamy, olive-oil based sauce with and for the salt cod; another for sea bream, which instructs the reader to take “one beautiful bream.” Other recipes incorporate pigeon, quail and duck heart; roast suckling pig; hare with walnut and chocolate; and Basque red beans (alubias de Tolosa) garnished with cabbage, pork ribs and blood sausage, with pickled green peppers on the side. The recipes are relatively straightforward, earthy, garlicky, and most of them sound pretty good, even if some ingredients might be hard to come up with. (I’m not too sure about hare with walnuts and chocolate.)

Kurlansky’s too good a researcher and writer to focus on fishing and food alone; he also follows the politics of Basque survival from ancient times through World War II. You’ll find detailed chapters on the causes and effects of the Spanish Civil War and the role played by World War II Basque Resistance fighters. For example, Basque members of the French Resistance - Spain considered itself neutral - dressed downed British airmen in Basque peasant garb, berets and rope-soled canvas espadrilles and then led them over the Pyrenees to Spanish Basque ports, whence they escaped to freedom and to fight again. Many Basque freedom fighters were later honored by the French government for their contributions to the Allied war effort.

On a personal note, I’m embarrassed to say I’m so apolitical I hadn’t known anything about the Spanish Civil War. Then about five years ago I bought an old wicker lidded basket to use as a summer handbag. To me, it was just a simple, functional basket. The following summer, at Stonington’s Fisherman’s Day, a white-haired man approached me and asked what I knew about it. I replied only that I’d bought it from an antiques dealer. He told me it was a lunch basket used by fighters in the Spanish Civil War. He’d carried one like it and hadn’t seen one since.

After reading Kurlansky’s fine and informative book, I treat that basket with newfound respect and kick myself for having been so ignorant that I couldn’t even hold a simple conversation with the man, couldn’t ask him any questions. I choose to think he was a Basque who’d fought for independence from Franco’s fascist Spain. After all, he was at Fisherman’s Day, and the Basques were the mariners of the world.