Not one Basque ship, but many. Engaged in what? In hunting whales.
Whalers they were, and whalers they had been in these parts for years
and centuries.
"How know I this? Because--the records are scanty, and pity it is that
they are not fuller--Cartier himself, and other of the old navigators
to these waters, found not only the Basque whaling ships before them,
but the nomenclature of all the shores and of the fish in the waters
purely Basque. Bucalaos is the Basque name for codfish, and the
Basques called the whole coast Bucalaos land, or codfish land, because
of the multitudes of codfish along the coast. And up to this day,
underlying the thin veneer of saint this and saint that, which
superstitious piety has given to every bay and cape and natural object
in gulf and on river, you find the old Basque names of places and
things--the solid oak beneath the tawdry coating applied by priestly
brush for churchly purposes. There is Basque harbor, Basque island,
and old Basque fort, and a place known as the spot where these
old-time whalers boiled their blubber and cured their catch of fish.
It was from these old Basque whalers, whose fathers and forefathers
for a thousand or thousands of years had visited this coast in
commerce, and who knew every cape, bay, island, shoal, and harbor from
the Bay of Fundy to Cape Tourmente, as well as from the old Icelandic
pilots, that Columbus learned of the existence of this Western
Continent; and when he sailed from Lisbon on his 'world-seeking
voyage,' I make no doubt that he as surely knew, by actual
information, of America, as I know that the island of Anticosti is but
200 miles below me. And yet I read in a paper somewhere lately that
some wise dunce had proposed to 'celebrate the fourth centennial of
the discovery of America by Columbus'! That's rich!
"To-night the yacht Champlain is swinging at anchor in the harbor of
Tadousac, and I am writing in her little cabin with a profound
conviction that, a thousand years