The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [21]
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.