The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [19]
Harpooning a whale. Shown on a Seal of Motrico, 1507, Municipal Archive of Motrico. (Untzi Museoa, San Sebastián)
IN 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.
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