It was published by Canada.com, here you have it:
For CanWest News Service
Saturday, July 15, 2006
When the crew of the whaling boat Beothuk rows up to the wharf today in Red Bay, Labrador, it will mark the recovery of a chapter in the forgotten maritime history of Europe's Basque people and the reforging of a long-forgotten link with Canada and its aboriginal people.
"It is very emotional for us," said Irene Manterola Odriozola, wife of one of the seven crew members who are completing a 1,800-kilometre journey from Quebec City in the replica of an open boat used by Basque whalers nearly 500 years ago. "We want to recover a little part of our history."
A bit of Canadian history, too, is being brought back to life. Although Basque fishermen have traditionally plied the cod trade on Canada's eastern seaboard, until recently Canadians had little idea the Basques played a major role in the whaling industry here between 1540 and 1610.
"The Basque whaling site was discovered 1977," says Cindy Gibbons, site supervisor for the Red Bay National Historic Site.
A Canadian archivist discovered documents in Spain referring to a large-scale fishery and 16 shore stations on the Quebec and Labrador coasts. This led archaeologists to remains of a shore station at Red Bay, where whale blubber was processed into oil. Underwater they also found the wrecks of 16th-century ships, including a 300-tonne galleon with a 1,000-barrel cargo of whale oil that sank in a storm in 1565, and eight-metre oared boats used in the hunt.
The Beothuk is a replica of one of these boats, called a chalupa.
"Basque people were here before the English or the French and with little facilities," says Odriozola. Although the Basques know about modern fishery ties to Canada -- Irene's father was fishing Canadian waters when she was born -- until recently, details of the whale fishery were lost to history.
As many as 50 European ships, each with a crew of 50 to 75, hunted bowhead and right whales on the Canadian coast at the height of the hunt, returning after eight months with holds filled with oil, prized as lantern fuel, and other whale products. It was dangerous work.
"Imagine how the wives suffered," said Odriozola. "They never knew when their husbands were coming back."
Or if they were coming back. Odriozola was particularly touched by a visit to the Basque cemetery discovered in 1982, which holds the remains of about 140 of her countrymen. "To see how ancient Basque people lived here, to know how our people suffered for years, and how many people died so far from home E it is very emotive."
The Basque homeland spreads across several French and Spanish provinces at the western edge of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay. There have been many attempts throughout history to suppress Basque culture.
In the 1990s, the Albaola society was formed to recover forgotten sea history by building and sailing replicas of original Basque boats. Its research and boat-building centre is located in Pasaia, in northern Spain, where precise replicas are built in public so visitors can see craftsmen use traditional methods.
Parks Canada underwater archaeologists supplied plans and drawings of the original chalupa and provided technical expertise in construction of the replica.
Research has shown the Basques had close and warm dealings with aboriginal people, who learned Basque greetings, traded with the Europeans and helped preserve the fish. That ancient relationship was honoured in naming the chalupa Beothuk, after the Newfoundland tribe obliterated by European settlers, by reserving one crew space for a member of the Mi'kmaq Nation and by visiting descendants of native peoples who helped the original Basque whalers.
Celebrated Basque poet Jon Maia, Odriozola's husband, was chosen as a crew member to document the journey. His daily journal is widely read back home, says Odriozola.
"She's a true beauty," Maia wrote of the Beothuk in his first report home in early June. "Crafted from oak timber, reminding us with her strong curved ribs of a whale's skeleton." With 1,000 hand-made nails in its eight-metre body, "this craft is the fruit of arduous labour."
It has taken the crew, dressed in period clothing, six weeks to sail and row the open boat from Quebec City to the southern tip of Newfoundland, and across the Belle Isle Strait to the Red Bay National Historical Site.
"It meant two things to me personally -- revisiting our past and looking forward to our future" said Stella Mailman of Port-Aux-Choix, who was on hand to greet the Beothuk's crew when it pulled in to her community on Tuesday. "Port-Aux-Choix has a long connection with Basque country."
Many local names were originally Basque, then changed by the English or French settlers who came to the area. One name, however, remains the same. As Maia's reports in his journal, the "60-mile crossing from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland, the Cabot Strait E until not so long ago was called the Basques' Strait. But the Port aux Basques ... is at least still the port of the Basques, even if only in name."
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