Softly Comes the Dawn 133 



means "to grasp or to hold," namely arpoi, from which we get har- 

 poon, via the Spanish arpon.^ 



Now, bone harpoons are found in palaeolithic cave sites of the 

 Magdalenian period dated about 16,000 b.c. not only in Basque 

 country but all around, and harpoons are troublesome and tedious 

 things to make with only stone tools to work with. They were made 

 for a specific and important purpose and not as toys or religious sym- 

 bols, and were obviously used for fishing. Most of them are only 

 about six inches long, but a few of more than double that size have 

 been found and it would have to be an awfully large fish that re- 

 quired such a large weapon. Could these palaeolithic peoples of 

 Spain, then, have been practicing offshore whaling eight thousand 

 years before the Norwegian rock carvers were so engaged, or about 

 eighteen thousand years ago? We have no evidence either in palaeo- 

 lithic rock paintings or in artifacts or materials found by excavation 

 that any whale products were used by the Magdalenians, but har- 

 poons continued to be made in that area till the dawn of history. 



The Romans mentioned tribes with a strange language in this area, 



but the first real record we have of the Basques occurs in a Latin 



document dated 980 a.d. which delimited the Diocese of Bayonne, 



though there are vague references in documents of the sixth century 



to their arrival north of the Pyrenees in what is now France. Enrique 



de Gandia (see Bibliography) provides interesting evidence from 



ancient texts that the Basques used leather canoes for shore fishing 



as early as 700 a.d., but he believes Basque pirates using large galleys, 



which are known to have been built somewhere in Spain at that 



time, actually reached the Faeroe Islands in 875 a.d. From Latin 



sources we learn that whales were fished in the Bay of Biscay in the 



same year, but the word used is not the Latin balaeJia, physeter, or 



orca, but crassus piscis, or "fat fish," which may probably refer to 



the porous piscis, or "pig fish," namely, the common porpoise. The 



earliest definite record of a proper whaling industry is embodied 



among privileges granted by King Sancho the Wise to the city of 



San Sebastian in 1 150 a.d. The next is dated 1 199 a.d. when one Jean 



Sans Terre gave to one Vital de Biel the tithe on two whales. But by 



this time the industry was fully organized among all the ports along 



the Basque coast. 



1 It has recently been pointed out that the Greek word for harpoon, arpoi, 

 has not only a similar, but an identical stem. 



