Canada

This chapter tells the story of a port in Labrador to which the Basque whalers returned summer after summer for decades, of what they left there under water and on land, and of the historian who found them by reading papers in the Basque archives.

The industry

It was an industry, and a seasonal one. According to Parks Canada, between the 1540s and the early seventeenth century up to 2,000 Basque men and boys came to the Labrador coast every year, and around half of them went to Red Bay.² According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the busiest years were the sixties and seventies of the sixteenth century, when between 15 and 30 whaling ships arrived every summer and each of them caught between 15 and 30 whales. The oil was carried in barrels of about 225 litres.³

Four and a half centuries later, that port entered the World Heritage List. On 22 June 2013 the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the Red Bay Basque Whaling Station on its list. Parks Canada describes it as the largest and most complete surviving example in the world of early industrial-scale whaling. It covers some 600 hectares of land and seabed.⁴

The galleon San Juan, the chalupa and the cemetery

Part of what remained lay under water. The galleon San Juan, from Pasaia, sank in Red Bay in December 1565 with about a thousand barrels of whale oil on board. Underwater archaeologists investigated it between 1978 and 1985.³ A drawing of the ship was chosen as the logo of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.²

A chalupa also turned up in Red Bay, the boat from which the whale was hunted: eight metres long and two wide, for a crew of seven, a steersman and six oarsmen, one of them the harpooner. Parks Canada considers it the oldest known whaling boat in North America. The icy water and the silt preserved it. It was reassembled from 153 pieces and returned to Red Bay on 1 July 1998.²

On land a large cemetery was found, with the remains of more than 140 people.³

The excavations lasted from 1977 to 1992 and were carried out by the Memorial University of Newfoundland, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and Parks Canada.²

Selma Huxley Barkham, the historian who found them

The road to Red Bay began far from Labrador. In 1972 the researcher Selma Huxley Barkham settled in Oñati to search the Basque archives for the presence of Basque fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador between 1530 and 1700. With those documents she identified the sixteenth-century whaling stations at Red Bay and located the wreck of the San Juan.⁶ In 1977 she received a grant from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society to travel to Labrador in search of the physical evidence.⁷

The same society awarded her its gold medal in 1980, and she was the first woman to receive it. She was also a member of the Order of Canada.⁷ In 2014 the Basque Government gave her the Lagun Onari award.⁶ She died on 3 May 2020, at the age of 93.⁷