The Basque Country has been more a town of “promiscuous sailors” than of “isolated peasants”, as worthy of admiration on some occasions as cause for fear on others. This suggestive idea lives on in the pages of the latest book by the writer Ander Izagirre, Vuelta al país de Elkano (Books of the K.O.). The work is a challenge to the myth of the Basques as a people enclosed in the hamlet, a story that proposes a journey through a small territory, although with incursions from the Moluccas islands to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, with the aim of rediscovering it and draw some lessons from the new global challenges.
The work, which is in its second edition, is commissioned by the foundation that in the Basque Country has managed the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation of the world, culminated by the Getaria sailor Juan Sebastián Elcano. Ander Izagirre, renowned journalist and writer awarded a few months ago in Poland with the Ryszard Kapuscinski prize, has approached it as a journey to rediscover a territory that he thought he knew well and that now he sees with different eyes. A tale of whale hunters, corsairs, agotes, Basque-French Jews, Basque-African fishermen, Indian entrepreneurs or intrepid surfers. A Basque Country that has been open and mixed for centuries, with a culture and a language accustomed to friction, borrowing and pidgin.
The journalist from San Sebastián believes that the myth of the bucolic and isolated Basque Country, “increasingly worn out”, was possible because it was built without looking at the sea. “Attention to Basque maritime history implies talking about surprising adventures, but also bloody episodes or conquests. The sea is complicated, and it seems that at a given moment it was easier to talk about a town that was here with its healthy customs until those from outside arrived ”, he indicates.
The truth is that this other history of the Basque world, the one that looks at the sea, is much more interesting and suggestive. It has in the whale one of its emblematic elements. “The country of the whale”, writes Izagirre, although for decades it was forgotten how the hunting of cetaceans shaped the Basque ports and was the engine of their economy. Despite the fact that they appeared on the shields of many coastal municipalities, an English historian -Selma Huxley- and a National Geographic report had to arrive to remember them.
“The whale was life, and it moved the economy not only in the coastal strip, but also generated parallel industries in the interior. When they wiped out the whales here, because it has to be said, they went looking for them all over the Atlantic,” he explains. From those incursions such peculiar elements as the Basque-Icelandic pidgin were born, reflected in a glossary of 745 words that is still preserved, or the Basque-Algonquin pidgin, a simplified language that mixed elements of Basque with words from the languages ??spoken by the native tribes. from Canada.
Izagirre maintains that today “we inhabit landscapes and admire postcards that we do not understand.” “We take selfies in San Juan de Gaztelugatxe -the islet known for the recording of Game of Thrones-, but we don’t understand the sense it made so that the boats wouldn’t get lost. It looks like a place designed for taking photos, but it was a matter of life and death”, he adds.
The San Sebastian writer does not make concessions to essentialisms, and on his trip he plans to rediscover every corner. “The farmhouse, an iconic element of the landscape, a chest of ancestral essences, a symbol of identity, is another product of the oceanic, traveling and promiscuous history of the Basques”, he points out. In many cases, they were “giant apple-pressing machines” to supply cider to “a fleet that multiplies because it begins to travel to America.” “They built a machine and went to live inside it,” he explains.
Sailors, writers, historians or chefs accompany Izagirre on his journey to rediscover the Basque Country. The archaeologist Mertxe Urteaga, an expert in the Romanization of the Basque territory, helps him demolish another myth, that of Asterix, a story that had drawn an indomitable people that resisted each imperial expansion. “Actually, the Basques were integrated into the Roman realm and received an update that made them stronger,” says Izagirre. The language that those Romans brought would remain engraved forever in a large part of the Basque lexicon.
In the work, a compilation of stories and adventures, two great contexts of globalization are drawn: one linked to the expansion of Rome and the other to the rise of navigation in the 16th century. The San Sebastian writer, however, also looks to the 21st century, to a new era of globalization, and intends to draw some lessons.
Izagirre wonders what a Basque is like today. And he found the answer in the Arctic, following the trail of some scientific tweets published from there in Basque. The author is Naima el Bani Altuna, a paleocenographer, sedimentologist, and geologist who studies past ocean warming. Her father is from Casablanca and her mother from Bergara. On one of her expeditions to the Arctic, her companions “were a little freaked out” to see how excited she was when passing through Biscayarhalvøya, the Biscayan peninsula, and Biscayarfonna, the Biscayan glacier. Vestiges of the whaling past. “I was impressed by imagining the Basque whalers installed on that coast, how they could get there in their wooden boats,” she narrates in the book.
The San Sebastian writer finds more answers in the port of Ondarroa, by the hand of Moussa Thior. This Senegalese fisherman and former wrestling champion speaks with pride of the degree of integration they have achieved in the village. “The important thing is to know people to remove prejudices. That is the good thing about Ondarroa, that it is a small town, we all know each other, and if someone does something bad, an entire community is not blamed ”, he explains. The author adds a note: “The first arrantzale that we know by name and surname is Cayo Julio Niger, a black boy from Bidasoa and a descendant of slaves. We come from a more global world than we think and today it would be a mistake to create walls”.
Ander Izagirre also glimpses another danger: complacency. In the Zarautz square, where the oxen pulled the galleons, he now sees surfers riding the waves, half a century after this discipline entered Europe on the Côte des Basques in Biarritz: “Before, the waves were a punishment and now they are a blessing. It’s wonderful that it’s gotten to that point. I am optimistic, I see a society with nerve and, in general, open, but stagnation is a risk and so would shutting ourselves in.”
