The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [48]
But in 1612, England’s King James I petitioned the Spanish crown to allow Basques to go to England and teach whaling. The first British whaling fleet was established with six Basque officers under contract. The Dutch also recruited Basques, who defied threats by Madrid of both the death penalty and confiscation of all property.
The Basques would have done well to have obeyed the Spanish crown. Instead, by the seventeenth century, the Basques had lost their monopoly on whaling. Once numerous countries had fleets, the European powers gained control of the whaling grounds.
Then, in 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht dealt a blow to the Basque long-distance fishing fleets, from which they never recovered. This treaty, ending the war known in Europe as the War of Spanish Succession and in the Americas as Queen Anne’s War, attempted to give something to each power. The Bourbons got to keep Spain. The Hapsburgs were given smaller nations to make up for the Bourbon victory. The British gained control of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia at the expense of the French, who were only compensated with limited fishing rights.
The result was that the Basques lost access to Canadian waters. They argued for historic fishing rights as the discoverers of the continent and the first to fish it. But power politics, not right of discovery, mattered in the Utrecht negotiations. The Basques who lived in France could use the limited French fishing grounds, but if they were from Spanish ports, as most Basque fishermen were, they had nothing. The king of Spain, having won Spain, did not have to be offered fishing concessions.
But in the long view of Basque history, a more important outcome of the war was that the Basques saved their homeland. The Bourbons, more than previous monarchs, wanted central power over their Iberian realm. They stripped Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragón of their regional privilege. But unlike these provinces, the Basque provinces and Navarra had supported the Bourbons in the War of Spanish Succession and, at this critical era in the formation of Spain, the Basques were allowed to keep their Fueros.
Fishermen off the coast of Guipúzcoa, 1910. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)
The old commerce, salt cod and whale, was over. The Basques were driven back to whaling in the Bay of Biscay. In the sixteenth century, Basques had landed several hundred whales a year in Newfoundland and Labrador. Between 1637 and 1801, Zarautz, a major whaling town in Guipúzcoa, landed only fifty-five whales from the Bay of Biscay. By 1785, when the Spanish government decided to form a whaling company and sent an emissary to find a Basque harpoonist, he could not find one.
By then, the Basques had found new opportunities in America. New products would be made into Basque fortunes, and the whale would be forgotten. Whales themselves were vanishing from “the Basque Sea.”
THE HOT PEPPER or the bean may be the American product that best shows the Basques’ genius for cooking, but the cocoa pod is the one that reveals their commercial skills. By the end of the seventeenth century, affluent Europeans craved chocolate, were addicted to it, some said. The leading producer of cocoa was the Spanish colony of Venezuela, and the principal purveyors were the Dutch, who, enjoying a near-total monopoly, were able to demand extremely high prices.
In 1728, in yet another example of the confidence and ambition of the Basques, a group of wealthy Guipúzcoans, led by Francisco de Munibe, the count of Peñaflorida, formed a Basque company, the Real Compañia Guipúzcoana de Caracas, the Royal Guipúzcoan Company of Caracas, to compete in the Venezuelan cocoa trade. The seventeenth-century Dutch West India Company had built a trade empire along the Atlantic coasts of Africa and the Americas. The British had established trading companies to