History of Basque whaling

[1] By the early 17th century, other nations entered the trade in earnest, seeking the Basques as tutors, "for [they] were then the only people who understand whaling", lamented the English explorer Jonas Poole.

[8] The whales were spotted by full-time look-outs from stone watchtowers (known as vigías) situated on headlands or high up on mountains overlooking the harbor, which limited the hunting area to several miles around the port.

[11] According to the Laws of Oléron, the whalemen of Biarritz, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and the rest of the French Basque country were exempt from taxation, although they voluntarily gave the whales' tongues to the church as a gift.

In 1197, the future King John of England (r. 1199–1216)[12] gave Vital de Biole and his heirs and successors the right to levy a tax of 50 angevin livres on the first two whales taken annually at Biarritz, in exchange for the rent of the fishery at Guernsey.

[9] Under a 1324 edict known as De Praerogativa Regis (The Royal Prerogative), King Edward II (r. 1307–27)[12] collected a duty on the whales found in English waters, which included the French Basque coast.

[14] In Lekeitio, the first document to mention the use of whales in its archives, dated 11 September 1381, states that the whalebone procured in that port would be divided into three parts, with "two for repairing the boat-harbour, and the third for the fabric of the church."

This practice included Bermeo (dated 1351), Castro Urdiales (currently outside the Basque region), Hondarribia (1297), Getaria, Lekeitio, Mutriku (1507, 1562), and Ondarroa in Spain; and Biarritz, Guéthary, and Hendaye in France.

From the number of extant documents and written references Aguilar (1986) surmised that French Basque whaling peaked in the second half of the 13th century, and subsequently declined.

The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) sounded the death knell for whaling in the Bay of Biscay, with the trade ceasing altogether in Cantabria (1720), Asturias (1722), and Galicia (1720).

"[3] Despite the seemingly low annual harvest, two factors must be taken into consideration when discussing the decline and later (nearly) complete disappearance of right whales in the region: one, the preference of Basque whalers to target mother-calf pairs; and two, exploitation of the species outside the Bay of Biscay.

Still, this possibility would result in the harvest of right whales not only in the Bay of Biscay, but in Iceland, Northern Norway, and the rest of Europe, which may have been enough to severely deplete this supposed stock.

[5] On 14 May 1901, a 12 m (39 ft) right whale was killed by fishermen using dynamite off the town of Orio,[20] an event reflected in a folk poem popularized by singer-songwriter Benito Lertxundi.

[23] In his History of Brittany (1582), the French jurist and historian Bertrand d'Argentré made the claim that the Basques, Bretons, and Normans were the first to reach the New World "before any other people".

[25] The Belgian cetologist Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (1878, 1892) repeated such assertions by saying that the Basques, in the year 1372,[Note 3] found the number of whales to increase on approach of the Newfoundland Banks.

The Basques called the area they frequented Grandbaya (Grand Bay), today known as the Strait of Belle Isle, which separates Newfoundland from southern Labrador.

[27] Ambroise Paré (1510–90), who visited Bayonne when King Charles IX (r. 1560–74) was there in 1564, said they used the baleen to "make farthingales, stays for women, knife-handles, and many other things".

The references include acts of piracy in the 1550s, the loss of a ship in 1565, a disastrous wintering in 1576–77, and, on Christmas Eve 1584, a will written for a dying Basque, Joanes de Echaniz; the first known Canadian will.

She grounded stern first on the northern side of Saddle Island, struck the bottom several times and split her keel open before sinking 30 yards from shore.

Sailing across the stormy North Atlantic must have been a very unpleasant experience for the crew of up to 130 men and boys, as they slept on the hard decks or filthy, vermin-invested straw palliasses.

The foundations of the tryworks were mortared with local or imported fine clay and sheltered by a roof of red ceramic tiles supported by heavily framed wooden posts dug into the ground.

The breeches were of thick, heavily teaseled wool, gathered at the waist and cut full at the hips, tapered to a tight fit at the knees, certainly making their owners warm and comfortable in the coastal tundra environment they had to live and work in, where the highest temperature (reached in August) was only 50 °F (10 °C).

[32][34] When an 8 m (26 ft) long whale was sighted, whaleboats called chalupas (chaloupes in French, and later shallops in English) were sent out, each manned by a steersman, five oarsmen, and a harpooner.

[9] Other factors, such as attacks by hostile Inuit (which, according to parish records, resulted in at least three instances of fatalities between 1575 and 1618), raids by English and Dutch pirates, and the opening of the Spitsbergen fishery (see below) may have also played a part in the decline.

In 1602, two Basque whalers accompanied Diogo Botelho, the newly appointed governor general of Brazil, to the colonial capital of Bahia de Todos os Santos.

The next year, 1612, they dispatched a single ship under the command of Juan de Erauso and piloted by the Englishman Nicholas Woodcock, a former employee of the Muscovy Company of London who had made two prior voyages to Spitsbergen (1610–11).

One of the Saint-Jean-de-Luz ships, the Grace-de-Dieu (700–800 tons), under Mignet de Haristiguy, sailed into "Schoonhoven" (modern Recherche Fjord), Bellsund on 16 June (OS), where they found the Dutchmen Willem Cornelisz.

They landed at one of the two Dutch stations there and plundered it, breaking up storehouses and huts, ruining utensils, and destroying shallops and setting them adrift – in all stealing 600 casks of oil and 200,000 lbs of baleen.

In July 1637, the Fleur, of Ciboure, under Dominique Daguerre, who had been whaling between 73° and 76° N, made the mistake of straying as far north as 78° N, where he encountered the Danish man-of-war De To Løver ("The Two Lions"), under Corfits Ulfeldt.

[18] In order to avoid having to pay fines to the sovereigns of northern lands (e.g. Spitsbergen, Finnmark), the Basques began using ship-board tryworks to process blubber into oil.

[3] The Southern Basques employed 250-ton frigates (r. 100–350 tons) with reinforced stem-posts and timbers in order to withstand the rigors of whaling in the West Ice - the area between eastern Greenland and Spitsbergen.