The Basque Terranova fishery and the Basque words the Innu answered in
Every spring from the sixteenth century Guipuzcoan ships sailed for the cod and whale grounds of Terranova. A Basque priest writing in 1625 set down the voyage, the rendering cauldrons, the barrel measure, and something else: the people of the shore had learned Basque from the crews, and when asked "nola zaude" answered "Apaizac obeto". By 1779 the society of Bilbao was recording that England now fished the cod that fed Spain.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of the Basque Newfoundland fishery is usually a paragraph about Red Bay archaeology, and the famous fact — that the peoples of the Labrador shore spoke a Basque-based pidgin — is normally passed along without a date, a wording or a witness, or else sourced to a modern secondary work quoting a modern secondary work. This entry goes to the sheet. It prints Isasti's 1625 sentence as the 1850 San Sebastian edition sets it, with the question "nola zaude" and the answer "Apaizac obeto" in place, and with the trade that surrounded it — help curing fish on the beach in exchange for ship's biscuit and cider — in the same breath, because that is where the source puts it. It then does what a defensive account would not: it prints, from the page before, the language Isasti uses about the same people, and the cannibalism he alleges of their neighbours, and marks both as a second-hand report rather than a fact. Around that it sets the working detail no summary carries — the sailing months, the rendering cauldrons, the twelve-man boat, the harpoon line and the estache, the whale that breaks the boat, the hundred and forty barrels, the tongue owed to the confraternity of San Pedro, the baleen at four hundred reales, and a provincial ordinance fining twenty thousand maravedis for a short cask. It closes with the ending, in a Basque source: by 1779 the society of Bilbao was telling the crown that England employed twenty thousand men catching the cod that fed Spain. And it lets modern ancient-DNA work correct the sixteenth century about which whale was being hunted.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The cod voyage was an annual institution with a printed calendar. Lope de Isasti, a priest of Lezo writing in Guipuzcoa in 1625, describes ships sailing to the coast "que llaman de Bacallaos, partiendo por el mes de Marzo y Abril, y volviendo por Setiembre y Octubre cargados del pescado bacallao que descargado en el puerto del Pasage se lleva á la villa de San Sebastian, de donde, y de otros puertos de Guipuzcoa se distribuye á todas las partes de España." The distance is disputed in his own footnote: "600 leguas ponen los pilotos, pero el D. Cedillo, cosmografo del Rey, dijo que no hallaba mas de las 446." The sentence carrying the figure begins on the preceding sheet, which was not opened, so the distance is taken from the note and not from the body of the text.
The whale voyage was a separate trade with its own product and its own obstacles. "Van tambien á esta region de Terranova por grasa llamada comunmente aceite de ballena, por hacerse del unto y grosura de las ballenas derretido en calderas. Hay en aquella costa de la mar abundancia de estas ballenas, que pasan de una parte á otra; pero es dificultosa la pesqueria de ellas por los montes de nieve que se hallan en la rivera de la mar, y sobre la misma mar en la parte que se hiela." The cauldrons are the whole industry in one word: the ships did not carry whales home, they carried rendered oil in barrels, which is why the shore stations existed at all.
Isasti distinguishes two peoples on that coast, and the distinction is drawn by how they treated the crews. Both are introduced with language that has to be quoted rather than paraphrased: "los hombres salvages que allá habitan como bárbaros sin casas y sin vestidos de paño, sino con solos pellejos de venados, y son de dos géneros; unos se llaman esquimaos, que son inhumanos, porque suelen dar asalto á los nuestros con sus arcos y flechas (de que son muy diestros) y matar y comerlos. Otros se llaman montañeses ó canaleses, que conversan con los nuestros y dan aviso, cuando sienten que vienen los otros malos." The names correspond to the Inuit and to the Innu of the Strait of Belle Isle. The cannibalism is an accusation reported at second hand in Guipuzcoa by a writer who never says he crossed, of a people he calls inhuman; it is recorded here as what the source says and not as what happened, and the confidence is set accordingly.
The most valuable sentence in the chapter is about language. Arguing that Basque is easy to learn by continued use, "como la experiencia ha mostrado con los castellanos, que se han avecindado en aquella costa de Guipuzcoa, que hablan bascuence razonablemente", Isasti carries the argument across the Atlantic: "y en region tan remota como Terranova han aprendido los salvages montañeses (que digimos arriba) con la comunicacion que tienen con los marineros bascongados, que van cada año por el pescado bacalao, que entre otras cosas preguntándoles en bascuence: nola zaude, como estás: responden graciosamente: Apaizac obeto, los clérigos mejor: sin saber ellos, que cosa es clérigo, sino por haberlo oído. Hablan y tratan con los nuestros, y ayudan á beneficiar el pescado en la ribera á trueque de algun pan bizcocho y sidra que allá no tienen ellos." Four things are recorded at once, in 1625, by a witness with no reason to invent any of them: that a contact language existed, that it was built on Basque and not on Spanish or French, that the exchange was labour for ship's biscuit and cider rather than tribute or plunder, and that the joke in the reply was the Innu speakers' own.
The killing is described as a trade with a technique and a casualty rate. The weapons are "unas armas arrojadizas que llaman arpones y chabalines"; the boats are "esquifes de cada doce ó quince hombres"; the harpooner throws "aquella arma con soga delgada, que llaman arponera atada á ella, y lo resto pegado á un estache, que es una maroma manual larga", paying out line because the whale runs for the bottom. Sometimes the line has to be cut and the whale is lost. Sometimes it is worse: the animal "con la gran ferocidad parte el esquife por medio y le echa á fondo con toda su jente", and Isasti adds that it has been seen to do this "no solamente con el golpe de la cola, pero solo el arrimo y aire de ella, y levantarlos en el aire y matarlos sin golpe: y asi andan entre ellas con grande peligro."
The carcass was worked up into four separate markets, and the accounting is printed. The meat, if fresh, was kept "en salmuera para comida de los franceses"; the blubber was melted "en hornos" into barrels, of which a large whale gave "ciento y cuarenta de á diez y seis arrobas" and others seventy, ninety or a hundred; the tongue went by custom to a church, "como en la villa de San Sebastian que se dá á la cofradia de San Pedro, y en Guetaria á la fábrica de la iglesia"; and the baleen, "sálenle de la boca de entre las agallas hasta nueve piezas", sold at four hundred reales and served "para telas, cabos de cuchillos y otras cosas". The oil supplied "algunas tierras de España, particularmente las de Navarra y Campos para alumbrarse y labrar paños, y para algunas enfermedades del ganado", and went by sea "á Flandes, Inglaterra y otras grandes Provincias". A barrel was worth about twenty ducados, and the barrel itself was a regulated measure: "ha de ser cuatro quintales centenares, que son diez y seis arrobas, y esta medida se ha de cumplir sopena de veinte mil maravedis segun la ordenanza provincial del cuaderno." A provincial fine enforcing a standard cask is a small fact that says the trade was old, large and organised.
Not every port made the crossing, and the alternative is described in the same chapter. Sailors of Orio, Zarauz, Guetaria, Zumaya, Deva and Motrico, "por no ir en tan larga navegacion y de tanto riesgo á Terranova", went instead each October to the coasts of Vizcaya and Asturias to wait for the whales passing along the shore in winter, killed them with the same boats and instruments, filled their barrels and were home by March. Some towns did not even go that far, taking whales off their own coasts from "particulares atalayas", the manned lookouts of the shore fishery. The Terranova voyage was the expensive end of an industry that already existed at home, which is why its technique arrived on the American coast fully formed.
Isasti claims the trade as his province's alone — "es de notar, que con estar descubierta la navegacion de Terranova y ser manifiesto el mucho provecho que de ella redunda sobre los de esta Provincia y no otros algunos osan ir allá" — and the 1850 editor, Rafael de Floranes, sharpens it into a priority claim in a footnote: that the Basques were the discoverers "con grande gloria suya y no menos embidia de los Ingleses y Franceses", that they hold "cedulas reales y muchos documentos, que se lo autorizan", and that the extracts of the Real Sociedad for 1775 put the assertion beyond doubt "contra los empeños de un frances, que pretendió disputarla vanamente". That is a nineteenth-century editor arguing a national case in a national quarrel, and the documents he says exist are named but not printed. The claim of exclusivity is recorded here as Isasti's and Floranes' claim, not as an established fact, and the confidence reflects that; French, Portuguese and English ships were on the same banks.
The same pages record the fishery contracting, in Isasti's own present tense. Because the Terranova whaling was so dangerous, "se ha dejado en algunos años, y se ha acudido á la costa de Noruega", where some who went "les fué bien al principio, y á otros que fueron despues por la contradiccion que hallaron les fué su perdicion". And an older trade had already gone the same way: the sailors of this coast used to sail to Ireland in small ships for hake, salmon and herring and for the hide and salt-meat trade, "sin alejarse á Terranova: y ahora cien años que cesó este trato y navegacion por la contradicion que se halló". Written in 1625, that dates the loss of the Irish trade to about 1525. The Basque North Atlantic was already a place where competition closed fisheries.
A century and a half later the reversal is complete, and it is a Basque body that writes it down. In the 1779 Extractos of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del Pais, a memoir arguing for the admission of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa to the free American trade carries a footnote on what the country has lost: "un millon de almas, que perdemos de poblacion, y entre ellas el equipage de 60 navíos de línea", and the warning that handing the advantage to the English "se rompe el equilibrio de las fuerzas navales, quedando las nuestras muy inferiores á las de la gran Bretaña". Then the sentence that closes the circle: "Esta potencia ocupa veinte mil marineros en la pesca del bacalao para la provision de España." The fishery Isasti had described as the province's own, feeding all parts of Spain, was by 1779 an English industry selling Spain its fish; the memoir's remedy is to relieve fishermen of the matrícula, after which Spanish coastal fish would sell "un tercio mas baratos, que el precio á que hoy se dá el bacalao". The figures are an advocate's and carry no source.
Modern zooarchaeology confirms the reputation and corrects the natural history. The 2023 Royal Society Open Science survey of European whale bone states flatly that "The Basques are by far the most renowned early whalers based on written evidence", and dates the oldest documentary record of Spanish whaling to a contract of 1190 between Santoña in Cantabria and the monastery of Nájera — four centuries before Isasti, and three before the Atlantic crossing. Its Spanish specimens are almost all Balaenidae, identified with the North Atlantic right whale. But for the American side it reports, from ancient-DNA work by McLeod and co-authors, that "the bowhead whale and not the North Atlantic right whale was the main target of Basque whalers in the western North Atlantic as was previously assumed". Isasti's "ballenas" at Terranova and his neighbours' whales off Guetaria were probably not the same animal. The finding reaches this entry at second hand through the 2023 paper, which gives no counts or dates for the western Atlantic and does not discuss Labrador at all.
What these sources cannot supply should be stated, because the gaps are large and they all fall on one side. There is no Innu or Inuit voice here at all: the only record of the contact language is a Guipuzcoan priest reporting a joke, and the people who made the joke are described on the facing page as barbarians without houses. Nothing read here gives a count of ships, men or voyages, a wage, a contract, an owner, a season's catch, or one document produced on the American shore. Isasti wrote in 1625 and never says he crossed; the printing is of 1850 and carries an editor arguing a case; the Bascongada memoir is advocacy of 1779. Above all, the archaeology of the Labrador shore stations — the excavated try-works, the sunken ships and the cemeteries, which are the best evidence anyone has for this whole subject and would also carry its death toll — was not reachable from where this entry was written, and nothing here establishes what the fishery did to the whale populations or to the peoples of the Strait of Belle Isle.