Canada

In Canada the Basque trace is old and has little to do with emigration. The Basques reached Newfoundland and Labrador in the mid-sixteenth century to fish for cod and hunt whales; they stayed for a working season and went home again. What remains of that is place names on the banks of the St. Lawrence and an interpretation centre, not a colony. Today’s Basque clubs do not descend from the whalers: there are two of them, they were born in the nineties, and one of them was founded with an eye on the Basque clubs of the United States.

The first to come were fishermen. According to the Auñamendi, by around 1550-1555 cod fishermen and whalers from ports such as Donostia-San Sebastián, Pasaia and Deba were already working off Newfoundland and Labrador.¹ Parks Canada places Basque whaling in Labrador between the 1540s and the early seventeenth century (see the whalers of Red Bay).²

Their passage was written on the map. On the banks of the St. Lawrence River there are still place names such as Anse-aux-Basques, Échafaud-aux-Basques and Île-aux-Basques, the last of them near Tadoussac.¹

The work did not end with the sixteenth century. It went on in the Gulf of St. Lawrence through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in 1663 twenty Basque whalers spent the winter on the Magdalen Islands, and in 1738 whaling moved from Bon Désir to Sept-Îles. Over the course of the eighteenth century the presence of Basque fishermen gradually dwindled.¹

Their memory is kept today in Quebec. In 1996 the Parc de l’aventure basque en Amérique opened in Trois-Pistoles, an interpretation centre about the Basque fishermen of the mouth of the St. Lawrence.⁵

The clubs came by another road. The two Basque organisations that the Basque Government recognises in Canada today were born in the nineties (see the Basque community today).⁸