History of the Basque diaspora

Long before the ships of the nineteenth century filled up with peasants, Basques had already left for America and Asia. They were different people, and they left for different reasons: sailors, whalers, merchants and officials who served an empire and who travelled, above all, alone. That departure lasted longer than the ones that came after it, and from it come many of the Basque surnames that today name streets, provinces and whole cities on the other side of the Atlantic.

Why they left: centuries of experience at sea

It was not character or a taste for adventure that pushed them, but something far more material. The Basques had spent centuries in maritime trade, navigation and fishing, and that, says the Auñamendi, “greatly facilitated their participation in the conquest”.²⁶ Behind it lay an industry. A good part of the fleet that besieged the Guadalquivir, from which the Castilian navy was born, was built in the shipyards of Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa.²⁷ On the same coast were the iron, the shipyards and the men who knew how to handle a ship.

It shows from the very first voyage. On Columbus’s first expedition, the records state that “a good number of Basques” signed on. One of them, a boatswain from Lekeitio whom the chronicles call Chachu, stayed behind as a settler at the fort of La Navidad.²⁶ He was probably the first Basque to stay in America. It was 1492, and the fort, the first Spanish settlement in America, had been built with the timber of the Santa María after she ran aground on Christmas Eve of that year.

Where they went: Newfoundland, Spanish America and the Philippines

The Basque whalers in Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada)

In the sixteenth century Basque whalers worked the waters of Newfoundland, Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. For a long time it was believed that they only fished for cod there, until the research of the historian Selma Huxley brought to light a complete whaling industry. According to Parks Canada, between the 1540s and the early seventeenth century up to two thousand Basque men and boys came to the Labrador coast every year, and around half of them went to Red Bay. The same agency describes Red Bay, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as the largest and most complete surviving example in the world of early industrial-scale whaling (see the whalers of Red Bay).³²⁹

Navigators, conquistadors and founders of cities

To the south, in Spanish America, it was the names that stayed. They explain why there are streets, provinces and whole cities with Basque place names on the other side of the Atlantic.

Source: Auñamendi Eusko Entziklopedia.²⁶

Two of those names explain why the Philippines was for centuries the Asian end of this first departure. Legazpi founded Manila in 1571 and governed the islands until his death. In 1565 Urdaneta found the return route across the Pacific, the tornaviaje, and with it made possible the Manila galleon, the line that joined Asia and America for two and a half centuries (see Urdaneta and the tornaviaje).³¹

The departures went on in the eighteenth century. Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, from Durango, was governor of Buenos Aires and founded Montevideo. And the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas held a monopoly for more than half a century on trade between the province of Caracas and Spain, introduced crops such as indigo and sugar cane, and played a decisive part in settling the Basque exodus in the Caribbean area.⁴

In the early modern period, the Basques went where the other Spanish communities went: Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, the Caribbean.

Why it is called the “colonial diaspora”

This stage has a name of its own in the literature. Gloria Totoricagüena divides Basque emigration in two, with 1898 as the hinge, and calls the first part the “colonial diaspora”. These were commercial, military and religious conquests within the Spanish Empire, carried out by qualified and influential people; young men predominated, and whole families rarely emigrated.²⁸

Whoever left then was not fleeing need. He left in the service of an imperial enterprise, and he was a sailor, merchant or official before he was a landless peasant. But that departure left a settled population for two centuries, and with it the surnames, the place names and the networks of fellow Basques that the emigrants of the nineteenth century found already in place when they arrived.

The second stage, the one that begins after the independence movements and the Spanish-American War, is something else: “the wave of European emigration to the already existing colonies in the New Worlds”, made up of economically or politically oppressed populations.²⁸