The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [47]
Martines de Recalde managed to make his way back from the debacle but died of exhaustion soon after. Oquendo, after a long struggle, arrived back in Pasajes with a few surviving ships, including his own Santa Ana, said to be one of the finest ships of the epoch. He also died of exhaustion a few days later.
The Spanish defeat by British gunners in the English Channel was not as decisive a blow as is often thought today. The battle gave the British confidence and weakened that of the Spanish, but it did not alter the naval balance of power, which had already favored the British because they had better gunners. The engagement simply destroyed the myth of Spanish naval power. The Spanish quickly rebuilt their fleet, but so many Basque fishing vessels had been lost that Guipúzcoan long-distance fishing was diminished for a decade.
As wars and treaties reduced fishing and whaling opportunities, the cultivation of corn provided work and drew many maritime Basques into the landed rural life. By the seventeenth century, growing corn, a crop that easily adapted to the mediocre farming conditions of Basqueland, became so profitable that it was thought to be creating a manpower shortage in the fisheries.
It was a hard life onboard Basque ships. Cod fishermen worked months off the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, while whalers went to the Davis Straits between Greenland and Baffin Island. They navigated around uncharted shoals and icebergs, rode out gales, chopped ice off the windward rigging to keep from capsizing. As with all professions of hardship and danger, a distinctive machismo developed. It was considered cowardly to “waste” deck space by stocking lifeboats. Basques in home port would wear a ring-and-chain gold earring to indicate that they had fished a spring-to-fall cod campaign in Newfoundland.
Adding to the danger was the Basques’ peculiar status as an unrecognized nation. Basques pursued their far-flung fishery during centuries in which the French and Spanish were repeatedly at war with each other and with the Dutch and British. While French and Spanish warships were squaring off on the high seas, Basque fishermen, some from French ports such as Biarritz, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Ciboure, and Hendaye, and others from Spanish ports such as Fuenterrabía, Pasajes, and Bermeo, were shipping out together, speaking their common language, in pursuit of whales and cod and the enormous profits they brought. They had little interest in the affairs of France and Spain.
But no one else saw it that way.
The Dutch and British navies attacked and sank Basque fishing boats on their way to and from the North. In 1625, the Compañia de Ballenas de San Sebastián was formed. This San Sebastián Whaling Company built an armed fleet of forty-one ships with 248 rowing skiffs and 1,475 fishermen. But the British continued to seize Basque fishing boats in Canadian waters and force the fishermen into what amounted to slave labor. When the Danish navy could find Basque ships off Iceland and Norway, it would expel them from those waters. As the North Atlantic opened up and became more competitive, North American fishing was increasingly difficult for the nationless Basques. Their 1351 treaty that established the principle of freedom of the high seas had been long forgotten. St.-Jean-de-Luz fishermen turned to the French government, which based four heavily armed warships in their port to protect Basque fishermen going to and returning from North America. In the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish, hoping to destroy French competition for Newfoundland cod, began attacking French Basque ships. Heavily armed ships out of St.-Jean-de-Luz began defending their fishermen. Eventually these ships, Corsaires, became privateers, operating independently but harassing Spanish ships in the service of France. Basque mariners were increasingly being separated into French and Spanish camps.
Spain regarded Basque maritime skills as a valuable strategic commodity to