From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Basques/Mario Mimeault
The first genuine Basque colony based on the fishery was established at Plaisance, Newfoundland, starting in the 1660s. While the government authorities in the colony were French, the population consisted largely of Basque fishers who came to seek their fortune in North America. In a climate of French-British rivalry, this colony managed to grow and survive for a number of years. However, the Treaty of Utrecht, which the two European powers signed in 1713, required the king of France to cede the colony to Britain, and its inhabitants moved to Île Royale (Cape Breton). Through their involvement in the fishery and intercolonial trade, Basques were central to the economic life of the fortress.
At the same time, entrepreneurs, mostly from the Basque country of France, spread out along the south coast of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Documents show that there were seasonal fishing stations at Niganiche and Shedabouctou, Nova Scotia; Miscou, New Brunswick; and on Île-Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island). Others settled on the islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence and on the Gaspé coast in Quebec. In 1659 Pierre Peyrelongue, a Bayonne merchant who had ships in the Strait of Belle Isle, sent fishers to Île de la Grande-Entrée in the Magdalen Islands. Then, at various times through the century, Bayonne merchants obtained exclusive fishing concessions in sectors of the Magdalen Islands and Île-Saint-Jean.
The fishing banks off the Gaspé peninsula were under-utilized, and the coast offered enough fish processing sites for everyone. In Percé, Nicolas Denys, seigneur of the area from 1653 to 1688, noted the presence of numerous Basque crews. “Among all those who ordinarily do this kind of fishing,” he wrote in an authoritative work, “the Basques are the most skilful.” Shipowners sent even more crews to these shores in the long period of peace that followed the Treaty of Utrecht. There were facilities in the coves of Pabos and Paspébiac that attracted numerous ships. Many Basque immigrants settled in these places, and starting in the late 1740s the port of Bayonne traded directly with this part of the Gaspé coast.
While fishers settled on the Atlantic coast, other Basques joined the group of French colonists whose settlements along the St Lawrence River in the interior were becoming increasingly established as time went on. The fur trade attracted Basques to the St Lawrence valley in the seventeenth century, and Tadoussac, in particular, became a major point of contact for their trade with aboriginal people. The founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, had to fight Basque competition in the early seventeenth century, and recent archaeological evidence tends to confirm that Basque fishers and traders preceded Champlain by several generations.
In the mid-seventeenth century, a few representatives of leading Bayonne families became part of the economic and social fabric of New France. The number of Basques living in New France – some fifteen between 1640 and 1700 – was small relative to the thousands of itinerants who came to the Gulf of St Lawrence. They played an important role, however, by virtue of their involvement in the colony’s administration and trade, attaining high positions through the kinship networks and commercial alliances that they wove.
In the eighteenth century, there was increased Basque settlement in New France. Nonetheless, there were never more than 124 pioneers who settled permanently in the territory, making the Basque region twentieth among French provinces in the number of settlers it sent to the St Lawrence valley.
After British armies defeated the French in 1760 and New France fell into British hands at the end of the Seven Years’ War three years later, the flow of migrants from the Basque country to Canada slowed down. Contrary to popular belief, however, it did not stop completely, and Basque families continued to settle along the coasts of Canada in the 1760s and 1770s.
Descendants of such families, such as the Turbides and the Chevaries, still live in the Magdalen Islands of Quebec. The vicissitudes of the Seven Years’ War disturbed their fishing routine, and they found refuge in the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, which remained French. The small archipelago soon became overpopulated. Seeking a larger territory, these families left for the Magdalen Islands in the interior of the Gulf of St Lawrence in the late eighteenth century.
The Gaspé peninsula, also in Quebec, received its share of newcomers as well. Census data provide the names of people who came to the Gaspé and surrounding areas both before and after the British conquest, either directly from the Basque country or from other parts of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Thus, the Castilloux family came to Chaleur Bay in 1780, the Bastaraches settled in the Miramichi valley in New Brunswick in 1790, Jean Aspirault got married in Paspébiac in 1830, and Nicolas Bernatchez came to the Gaspé from the Lower St Lawrence region in 1837.
People continued to emigrate as a result of ongoing overpopulation in the Basque country; in addition, with the ancestral system of inheritance still in force, young people had to find work outside their region of origin. However, in contrast to previous centuries, it was now primarily farmers rather than fishers who migrated to the New World. Between 1832 and 1891, 112,000 French Basques left for South America and California where they found work herding cattle and sheep and delivering milk.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a new outlet for Basque emigration emerged in Canada. The newly cleared Canadian west needed labourers. There was demand for forest workers in British Columbia and field hands in Alberta. In October 1908 the Canadian government appointed an official immigration agent in Paris, a young Montreal lawyer named Arthur Geoffrion, with the task of finding workers who could meet the demand for labour as quickly as possible. Geoffrion immediately went to the Basque country to convince people of the advantages of Canada.
Quebec was also opening up new agricultural regions at this time, and it too was interested in Basque farmers. The president of the Société de Colonisation de Montréal travelled to Euskarie in 1908 to try to direct a portion of its flow of emigrants to Abitibi and Lac Saint-Jean. There does not appear to have been much response, since there was no significant Basque participation in Quebec’s movement towards the land. On the other hand, there was a large influx of Basque fishers who came to Quebec from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon in 1907. A shortage of fish in their fishing zone had reduced them to misery, and they believed that a better fate awaited them in neighbouring Quebec. Three thousand refugees arrived in Montreal all at once, and the local economy was clearly unable to absorb them. Most of them had no choice but to return to the Basque country.
Canada continues to receive some Basque immigrants today. In the 1991 census 495 new residents of Canada listed their origins as being in the Basque country, while 1,340 Canadians listed dual origins: French-Basque or Spanish-Basque. Quebec received 815 of these immigrants, more than any other province, with Ontario second at 460. Among Canadian cities, Montreal was the most common destination, with 165 Basque immigrants, but Basque immigrants also settled in a number of other Canadian urban areas: fifty-five in the Vancouver/Victoria region, twenty in Ottawa/Hull, another twenty in Toronto, and ten in Halifax.
In addition to the fifty-five immigrants in the area around Vancouver and Victoria, there is a small community of Basque seasonal workers from Vizcaya in Spain, not counted in the census because they are not Canadian citizens. These people worked in the sugar harvest in Queensland, Australia, in the 1980s, but when sugar operations were mechanized they lost their jobs and came to the construction sites of British Columbia instead.
These new immigrants are different in some ways from their predecessors. They are mostly young, of working age, and are more likely to settle permanently than the fishers who came in previous centuries. In addition, unlike earlier Basque immigrants, they include substantial numbers of women: in the group of immigrants counted in the 1991 census, 45.8 percent were female. Finally, while earlier immigration was limited to the Atlantic coast and related essentially to the sea, current immigrants go to all parts of Canada and are more likely to settle in urban areas.
