IN NOETH AMEEICA. 23 



voyages of the French to the New World, there is nevertheless ample traditional evidence 

 that they made several distant expeditions before the discoveries of the Portuguese and 

 Spaniards The Basques and the Bretons had for several centuries the monopoly of the 

 whale and cod fisheries, and it is remarkable that Sebastian Cabot, on discovering the 

 coast of Labrador, should have iound there the name Bacallaos, which in the Basque 

 language signilies cod-iish." 



Abbé Faillon ' writes that long before Jacques Cartier's time, the sailors of Normandy, 

 Brittany and the Basque provinces, had given names to several ports on the Atlantic 

 seaboard and the shores of the Gulf, and Father Charles Lalemant, writing home from 

 Quebec in 1626, drew attention to the fact that the Indians of the country called the sun 

 " Jesus ", a name which, he believed, they had learned from the Basques who formerly 

 dwelt there." 



Lescarbot, indeed, went so far as to say that, so long and so intimate had been the 

 intercourse between the Basques and the aborigines of Newfoundland and the Gulf shores, 

 that the language of the latter had come in time to be half Basc[ue. If such a development 

 of any native American tongue had really taken place, it would give to the theory of 

 Basque- American affinity a ratification that would be welcome to its advocates. As yet, 

 however, the statement of the versatile Lescarbot has not received that verification which 

 would alone give it any value. 



We have, it is true, ample evidence, after the beginning of the sixteenth centiiry, of 

 the enterprise and energy with which the Basques pursued their calling as fishermen in 

 Canadian waters.^ 



It appears, however, that the intercourse of the Basques with the Indian population 

 was confined, for the most part, to such communications as were called for in the pursuit 

 of their chosen industry. They seldom made any long stay on land, and still more rarely 

 did any of them decide to settle in the New World.' The early colonists of New France 

 were mainly from Normandy, Perche, Aunis, Poitou, Brittany and Saintonge. The mass 

 of them were from north of the Loire. If the Basque provinces furnished any at all, they 

 were extremely few. The Basque sailors and fishermen crossed the Atlantic, not as 

 colonists, but as traders. Their ambition was to make a little fortune and return home 

 to their own land. When they did emigrate, it was not to Canada but to Mexico and to 

 South America that they directed their course. If, therefore, it were proved beyond any 

 suspicion of doubt that the Basques had obtained a knowledge of the northern portion 

 of America even before the time of Columbus, our interest in them would not so much 

 lie in that fact, which has had but a trifling influence on our national evolution, as in 



' Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada, i. 1. ' Kelations des Jésuites, 1626, p. 4. 



'' That what the Basque fishermen and others who visited this continent in comparatively recent times found 

 so easy a task, was equally practicable in ages more remote, has been clearly brought out by Sir Daniel Wilson in 

 his paper on "The Lost Atlantis," in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada for ISSG. On the same 

 subject may be consulted Wilson's Prehistoric Man, ii. chaps. 19, 22 & 24 ; Humboldt's Kosmos, ii. 601-612 ; Bancroft's 

 Native Races of the Pacific States, v. 102-129; The North Americans of Antiquity, by John T. Short, chap, iii ; 

 Histoires des Grands Voyages, by Jules Verne, i. 1-150, chaps, i-vi ; Les Normands sur la Route des Indes, by 

 Gabriel Gravier; Rafn's Antiquitates Americanje, and essays by Me.ssieurs E. Beauvois, Paul Gaffarel, Luciano 

 Cordeiro, etc., on the Voyages of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Welsh, Irish, Northmen, Portu- 

 guese, etc., in the Comptes- Rendus of the Congrès des Américanistes, etc. 



* Frontenac had Basque blood in his veins. 



