Cover the Territory

In 1983, at Red Bay, Labrador, archeologists for Parks Canada recovered a well-preserved boat that sank in 1565. About twenty-six feet long and six and a half wide, the graceful craft of oak and pine could move by oars or sails. The builders were Basques, from the Bay of Biscay along the north shore of the kingdom called Spain. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hundreds of Basques annually crossed the Atlantic to harvest codfish, whales, and seals from temporary base camps built on the shores of Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In their ships, they brought along the materials to assemble smaller working boats of the sort found by the archeologists. Called a txalupa by the Basques, this sort of boat was a chaloupe to the French and a shallop to the English. (With a crew of five, a recent replica sailed hundreds of kilometres at the brisk pace of fourteen knots under sail.)

The Basques loom small in our histories because they...