Bill Fitzhugh maps the blacksmith’s shop’s floor, 2008. The Smithsonian research vessel PItsuilak rides at anchor in the bay. Fitzhugh and his team live aboard the boat, which takes its name from the Inuit word for a seabird, during their excavations. Bill Fitzhugh
Bill Fitzhugh knew he'd found something when he stepped off his research boat in the summer of 2001 at Quebec's Hare Harbor and saw red tiles beneath wet moss.
Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center at the National Museum of Natural History, had sailed up Canada's coast in search of Basque sites. The curved red tiles caught his eye because they were unique to Basque buildings. For the next seven summers Fitzhugh returned to the same spot to lead an archaeological dig.
Though the Basques were a major presence in Canada and South America from the 16th to the 18th centuries, physical evidence of their activities has been scant—and that's what Fitzhugh has been after. An independent people, the Basques originated in the mountainous region of southwest France and northwest Spain. They were master mariners and some of the first to ply the waters between Europe and the New World. Basque traders set up summertime camps on Canada's east coast. They fished cod and hunted whales, harvesting the meat and oil to sell in Europe. Historians have frequently overlooked the Basques because unlike later British, French and Dutch explorers, the Basque interest in the New World was purely commercial.
"The Basques didn't go around planting flags. They just made money and weren't really interested in anything else," says Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World.
Previous archaeologists had found evidence of Basque outposts at Red Bay on the Strait of Belle Isle in New Foundland, where the Basque harvested whales well into the late 16th century. When Fitzhugh began excavations at Hare Harbor, 150 miles west of Red Bay, he assumed he'd find remnants from the same period.
But Fitzhugh's work has unearthed two surprises. In early excavations at the site, he found colorful glass trade beads mixed in with distinctive Basque iron implements. Trade beads were used as currency by the Basque and other Europeans in their dealings with indigenous tribes. Lab studies revealed that these beads had been manufactured between 1680 and 1720—the first archaeological evidence that the Basques had continued to travel to Canada into the early 18th century.
The second surprise surfaced this past summer. The team began excavating what they thought was a midden, a pile of trash left behind when a settlement or camp is abandoned. Instead, they found a Basque blacksmith shop. The floors and walls were charred, suggesting there had been a fire. Then, when Fitzhugh lifted up the floor's stone paving slabs, he found another charred wooden floor. Scattered about were toys carved from soapstone, a form of Inuit handiwork. "That's when we knew we had an Inuit family at the site," Fitzhugh says.
Like the Basques, the Inuit were drawn to the region to hunt whales, as well as seals and walruses. Historical accounts from the era, including the writings of Jesuit priests, suggest that contact between Basques and Inuit was limited but hostile. Although the Inuit resented the presence of European fishermen, they avoided direct confrontations with the more numerous Basques. Instead, when the whalers returned to Europe each winter, the Inuit raided the abandoned Basque shore stations for small boats, iron weapons and cookware—and sometimes burned down the work sheds to retrieve nails.
But Fitzhugh says the Inuit dwelling he discovered suggests that the two peoples might have lived together on occasion. "This is the first time we've really seen cooperation," says Fitzhugh. "We think the Basques hired this Inuit family to come help them in summertime, and then employed them to be guardians of the site in wintertime."
The Basque-Inuit partnership at Hare Harbor was probably short-lived. By 1700, French traders had arrived in Canada. The Inuit attacked isolated French outposts, raiding them for goods. The French struck back and allied themselves with local Indians to attack the Inuit. In 1728, a French commander recorded the death of an Inuit family in one such raid. Fitzhugh thinks the Frenchman might have been writing about the Inuit family whose household he found at Hare Harbor.
The massacre was so notorious that it may have lent the place its nickname. "We knew the local folks still living here called our little harbor 'Eskimo Harbor,'" Fitzhugh says. "Until now we couldn't figure out why."
Workers examine the remains of the blacksmith shop and Inuit house, which lie behind the Basque cookhouse.
Bill Fitzhugh maps the blacksmith’s shop’s floor, 2008. The Smithsonian research vessel PItsuilak rides at anchor in the bay. Fitzhugh and his team live aboard the boat, which takes its name from the Inuit word for a seabird, during their excavations.
The floor of the blacksmith’s shop covered over with stones after the dig ended, in August 2008.
Petit Mecatina, Hare Harbour. Bill Fitzhugh’s dig is in the greenery to the left, under the shadow of the overhanging rock. A motorboat traces a path between the dig site and the research vessel Pitsiulak, where Fitzhugh and his team live during their summer excavations.
In 2008, Bill Fitzhugh lifted the paving stones of the Basque floor and found the charred floorboards of the Inuit house beneath them. The Inuit floorboards appear, partially excavated, in the top of the picture.
Bill Fitzhugh combined land excavations with underwater exploration of the nearby harbor. A diver brought up this Iberian olive jar from the waters near the site. The jar might have been brought over by Basque traders.
Bill Fitzhugh suspects that the Inuit used this toolbox, unearthed by the archaeologists in August 2008, as the front step to their house. The wooden pieces used to make the box were sawed, not cut, suggesting that the toolbox is of Basque origin. The tools lying on the flat board (to the left) were made by Inuit.
The Basques molded these curved red tiles from clay and baked them. The red tiles often appear on rooftops and are a signature of Basque architecture.
Late 17th-century glass beads that enabled Bill Fitzhugh to date site. Jean-Francois Moreau and Anja Herzog
Basque people were there mainly for fishing and whaling. They traded their seafood supplies in Europe. The Basque migrated and settled in Eastern Canada for more than a century and got along well with the local indigenous people. They likely explored beyond their fishing and whaling zone to search for more fish and whales. There's also a lot of archaeological sites that are underneath soils and rocks in those regions that has not been excavated yet. Hopefully one day they will begin digging and that will provide us more insights into Basque history as well as Amerindians' history and other Europeans' history.
Basque people were known for their shipbuilding as they provided Spain and other European countries sailing vessels for either exploration, migration, cartographic mapping, trade, specific missions, and cargo loading and unloading. They probably provided ships to other countries for battles, piracy, raids, sieging a fortress, and treasure depositing and hunting, and rescue missions.
They dominated the European whale trade for five centuries, spreading to the far corners of the North Atlantic and even reaching the South Atlantic.
Basque whalers (fl. 670-1713) hunted whales in the Atlantic Ocean, from Spitsbergen north of Norway to Brazil, but especially near what is now Newfoundland, Canada. Itseems they reached the Americas before Columbus.
Basque Whalers: The Tale of the Last Whaleboat
This documentary chronicles the reproduction of the vessel and journeys of 16th century Basque sailors, some of the first Europeans to come to the east coast of North America. Their vessel: a perfect replica of a shaloop made at the shipyard of Pasaia, located on the eastern coast of Gipuzkoa in the Basque Country of Spain. This film chronicles the construction of the vessel and the 6- week, 2,000 mile expedition under oar and sail to retrace the steps of their Basque ancestors. The crew traveled trough Canada, rewriting international sea history, rediscovering cross-cultural connections, and reliving an important piece of Basque history and culture.
(Scroll to 3:01 to 3:18, an Amerindian mentioned that the Canadian Mi'kmak people talked to the French Explorer and Cartographer Cartier in Basque, suggesting that the Basque people were already in Eastern Canada for quite some time.)
Video
The Replica of the XVI Century Basque whaling ship San Juan
Basque whalers (fl. 670-1713) hunted whales in the Atlantic Ocean, from Spitsbergen north of Norway to Brazil, but especially near what is now Newfoundland, Canada. Itseems they reached the Americas before Columbus.
Basque country
The Basque live on the Atlantic coast of Europe, their country divided between France and Spain. They speak a language unrelated to any other in Europe.
Their land was not great for farming, but it had plenty of oak and iron – perfect for building ships. There was plenty of cod off their coast and whales wintered there too.
By 670 the Basques were hunting whales at sea. They preferred Eubalaena glacialis: they float when you kill them and can produce huge amounts of oil.
Eubalaena glacialis or the North Atlantic right whale. They can weigh up to 60 tons, half of it blubber, which can be turned into oil.
Range of Eubalaena glacialis with Newfoundland and Basque country circled in red
In the 800s the Norse (Vikings) arrived. They taught the Basque two things: how to make better ships and how to cross the ocean. Contrary to what you might think, there are hardly any fish in the middle of the ocean. There is no food out there. The trick, as the Norse discovered, was to bring enough salted, dried cod.
The Basque followed whales north in the summer. They may have followed them all the way to Newfoundland and discovered the huge cod fishing grounds there. The Norse themselves reached Newfoundland by 999.
By the 1300s the Basque were selling so much cod that no one knew where they were getting it from. No fishing grounds near Europe could account for it. But the fishing grounds near Newfoundland could – and later did.
In the 1400s the Basques were rumoured to have discovered a land or island in the Atlantic.
In 1412 Basque whalers were recorded sailing west from Iceland.
By the late 1400s Basques built the best ships in Europe. They probably built and helped man the Santa Maria of Columbus and the Victoria of Magellan, the first ship to go around the world (in 1,096 days).
In 1497 John Cabot, an Italian explorer hired by the English, arrived in Newfoundland, making the first recorded Western discovery of the island. Some reported that the people there tried to speak to him in – Basque!
By 1512, at the latest, Basques were in the region. They had the fishing grounds mostly to themselves till the 1600s.
French map of Basque fishing sites, 1500s and 1600s. Terre-Neuve is Newfoundland.
Unlike the English, the Basque did not keep themselves apart from the natives of North America. Unlike French Jesuit priests, they did not look down on them as wretched savages sunk in superstition. They thought the Innu (Montagnais), for example, were “extraordinarily capable and ingenious” and called them “real allies and friends”. They spoke to each other in a pidgin language that was half Basque and half Algonquin.
In the 1600s the French, Dutch and English came in numbers and planted successful colonies in North America. The Basque taught whaling to the Dutch and English. Huge mistake: Despite a treaty of safe passage, the English attacked Basque shipping and started to take over.
By 1713 it was over: at the peace conference at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, the English got Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
Basque harpoon, 1500s
A beach near Middle Bay, Quebec where the Basque processed whales in the 1500s
In the early sixteenth century, Basque ships sailed from the Bay of Biscay across the North Atlantic to the Labrador coast and the Strait of Belle Isle, which the Basques called Gran Baya (Grand Bay). Every year, between fifteen and twenty Basque crews fished cod and, more importantly, harpooned bowhead whales and right whales. Shore workers built open-air sheds with tryworks, where they rendered the whale blubber into oil. They also built cooperages, where they made the barrels necessary for transporting the oil. They established contact with Indigenous groups in the Strait of Belle Isle and laid the foundations of the fur trade.
Within a hundred years or so, the whale population had declined because of the intensive hunts. Competition from other countries had increased, New France had grown stronger, and Inuit trading partners had become hostile. The Basques ended their activities in the region, and their once dominant presence there was largely forgotten.
In the 1970s, archaeologist Selma Barkham discovered thousands of whaling-related documents gathering dust in archives in the Basque country. Her research stimulated interest in the Basque whaling era in the New World and led to excavations at Red Bay, Labrador, where the remains of large-scale whaling operations were found.
Barkham also located period manuscripts that pinpointed Blanc Sablon as a former Basque whaling port. In the intervening years, professional and amateur researchers have unearthed characteristic red roof tiles and other artifacts of Basque origin on the Lower North Shore that indicate the historical existence of whaling installations in Middle Bay and a fishing station in Havre Hare (now Havre aux Lièvres), Petit Mécatina.
In August 2022, William Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, and his assistants, Francisco Rivera and Sarai Barreiro Argüelles, discovered evidence of small Basque tryworks on the island of Bonne Espérance off the shore of St. Paul's River. These remains—huge slabs of baleen, barrel staves, a headless iron spike, and Basque ceramics—may date from the mid-sixteenth century or earlier when very large bowhead whales were still prevalent in the Northern Gulf of St. Lawrence. “It may have been a Basque whaling operation that hadn't yet taken the full industrial form seen at Red Bay,” William Fitzhugh points out.
“Bowheads have thick blubber—up to eight inches thick. They're associated with ice, and this was the Little Ice Age. It suggests that Arctic conditions extended much farther south than today and included the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which in recent years has hardly had any ice at all.
This headless iron spike was among the artifacts found on Bonne Espérance in August 2022.
(Photo: Louise Abbott)
“We also dug a couple of test pits north of the baleen pit. We were able to confirm that there was cultural material there and that it may have been a domestic area or habitation area. People may have been living ashore.
“There's a lot we don't know at this point. But it's all very interesting in terms of the site's potential for future excavation and research.”
William Fitzhugh, Sarai Barreiro Argüelles, and Francisco Rivera at work on Bonne Espérance
A silent world, deep within the limestone caves of Palawan, holds an astonishing secret: artworks that may shatter everything we thought we knew about ancient creativity in Southeast Asia. Imagine stumbling upon a ghostly handprint, perfectly preserved for tens of thousands of years, or a sweeping animal figure drawn with a skill that rivals anything found in Europe’s famous caves. Recent discoveries in Palawan aren’t just rewriting history books — they’re inspiring awe, sparking debate, and captivating the hearts of everyone from scientists to adventurers. Could it be that the oldest masterpiece in Southeast Asia was painted here, in the heart of the Philippine jungle?
