The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [107]
Since the Orio River, which twists past the stone houses of Aguinaga, is a suspiciously bright green-gray color, and its banks are peppered with bits of trash, the companies started supplementing their dwindling catch by buying French and British elvers. But, Angulas Aguinaga claimed to be saving the eels and even asked the European Community to ban elver fishing.
Then, in the early 1990s, the angulas started coming back.
EELS HAVE ALWAYS puzzled man. Until the 1920s, no one had been able to identify reproductive organs in the creatures, and it was often supposed that Aristotle had been right when he stated that they somehow were created out of the mud. An eighteenth-century Italian had claimed to discover an eel’s ovaries, but the scientific world did not accept his finding for another seventy years simply because no one had ever seen an eel egg. If eel eggs could have been found, no doubt the Basques would have eaten them too.
In the twentieth century, the surprising discovery was made that the eels in the Orio were not Basque at all. In fact, all of the European eels and all of the American eels, a related species but with approximately ten fewer vertebrae, are born in the middle of the Atlantic, in the deep, warm, algae-laden waters off Bermuda known as the Sargasso Sea.
The tiny, newborn, oval-shaped creatures then begin a journey, like salmon in reverse, to the river of their parents’ adulthood. By the second summer they pass the Azores and have grown to five times their original size, but are still only a quarter the size of a tiny river elver. In the fall of the third year, they reach the Orio River and continue to grow, until they become angula size by the winter.
Most of this process is still unknown. Once a full-grown eel leaves a European river, it seems to vanish in the depths, and the cycle has never been entirely traced. So it was not known why, later in the 1990s, the eels began to disappear from the rivers once again. Was it pollution? Aguinaga fishermen had been saying for years that most of the elvers that they didn’t catch quickly, died in the green Orio. Or were they just taking too many of them? Every elver that is eaten is one that will not grow into an eel and swim back to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce.
And yet the Basques had always taken huge quantities of elvers. In 1775, a British naturalist on a trip to Bilbao said that elvers were caught “by the millions.” A French naturalist, Louis Roule, made some calculations based on early-twentieth-century train records from Landes, the region on the other side of the Adour, and found that in 1906, between 100 and 150 million elvers were shipped by train.
BY THE LATE 1990s, the Basques were growing desperate. In Hendaye an elver shop operated near the St. Jacques Bridge border crossing, selling in either pesetas or francs. The shop was only open in the winter, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Soon it was sold out by Friday. Eventually it was only open one day a week. The shopkeeper’s father had bought the antique building in a viager contract, a French arrangement in which the owner is paid a lifetime salary and the payer inherits the property. The owner had died early enough so that the house had been a bargain, and with no real overhead, the son was able to be in the angula business. But after a while he did not even have enough for a full day. The storefront looked like an empty fish shop with a long refrigerated display counter inside containing only one cloth-covered shallow crate.
The son even tried selling “white elvers” for half price, which, since the price had soared to more than $100 a pound, was still not a bargain. White elvers were ones that for one reason or another had died before they got to the tanks and had been cooked already dead—the mushy ones that are usually culled from the bunch. No, most Basques would rather eat a gula.
In time, most Basque rumors prove to be at least partly true and eventually companies