From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Basques/Mario Mimeault
The Basque homeland has produced a rich vein of historical writing. Many works cover such topics as human geography, national history, seafaring, language, culture, and folk traditions. There are a few books that deal with almost all of these topics, and readers will find these especially worthwhile. Two such books are Philippe Veyrin, Les Basques de Labourd, de Soule et de Basse Navarre: leur histoire et leurs traditions (Paris, 1955), and Jacques Allières, Les Basques, 3rd ed., Que sais-je, no.1668 (Paris, 1986). Few books, however, deal specifically with Basque emigration to the New World and none contains a study of migration to Canada. Neither Veyrin nor Allières devotes more than a few paragraphs to emigration. Despite its age, Pierre Lhande’s book L’émigration basque: histoire–économie–psychologie (Paris, 1910), which contains several pages on Canada, is worth consulting.
On this side of the Atlantic, René Bélanger deals extensively with the early expeditions by Basque sailors to the New World in his book Les Basques dans l’estuaire du Saint-Laurent (Montreal, 1971), but his research only goes as far as the early seventeenth century. At a scholarly level, Mario Mimeault’s M.A. thesis, “Destins de pêcheurs – les Basques en Nouvelle-France: une étude de la présence basque en Nouvelle-France et de son implication dans les pêches en Amérique sous le régime français” (Laval University, 1987), presents a historical synthesis based essentially on Canadian documentation. A recent work by Jean-Pierre Proulx, Les Basques et la pêche de la baleine au Larrador au XVIe siècle (Ottawa, 1993), covers a particular aspect of a very specific period.
A number of journal articles deal with the Basque presence in North America. Selma Barkham has done the most valuable work on the contribution of Spanish Basques, in articles such as “Identification of Labrador Ports in Spanish 16th Century Documents,” Canadian Cartographer, vol.14, no.1 (1977), 1–9, and “Guipuzcoan Shipping in 1571 with Particular Reference to the Decline of the Transatlantic Fishing Industry,” in Anglo-American Contributions to Basque Studies: Essays in Honor of Jon Bilbao (Reno, Nev., 1977), 73–81. Some of Barkham’s studies cast new light on early contact between Europeans and aboriginal people, such as “A Note on the Strait of Belle Isle during the Period of Basque Contact with Indians and Inuit,” Études inuit/Inuit Studies, vol.4, nos.1–2 (1980), 51–58. Peter Bakker has studied these same contacts in terms of their cultural impact in North America, notably in “The Langauge of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque: A Basque-Amerindian Pidgin in Use between Europeans and Native Americans in North America, c. 1540–1640,”Anthropological Linguistics, vol.31, nos.3–4 (1991), 117–47.
