Basques

“ What little literature there is in the Basque language is naturally of the popular cast—hero songs, dancing songs, dirges, hymns, and folk-lore.
The Basques are noted for their passionate love of liberty. The sturdy peasant is lord of his own rugged farm, and insists on tilling it in his own primitive way, breaking the soil with 366 rude mattock more often than with plough. An English engineer, laying a railroad through Alava, tried his best to make his men abandon their slow, laborious method of carrying the earth in baskets on their heads. ”

“ The Iberians are represented to-day by the Basques.
The Basques are "of middle size, compactly built, robust and agile, of a darker complexion than the Spaniards, with gray eyes and black hair. They are simple but proud, impetuous, merry, and hospitable. The women are beautiful, skilful in performing men's work, and remarkable for their vivacity and grace. The Basques are much attached to dancing, and are very fond of the music of the bagpipe." ("New American Cyclopædia," art. Basques.) ”

“ While thus the Spanish Basques have, even under allegiance, held stoutly to the right of virtual self-government, their brethren north of the Pyrenees long preserved a still fuller autonomy, only coming into the national fold of France under the impetus of the Revolution.
Thus the Basques have a stiff record of independence; it keeps them in no little esteem, both with themselves and with their neighbors. Trains, travel, traffic, eat into their solidarity, and may in time disintegrate it; but a Basque has not yet lost a particle of his pride of clan ”

“ In their wars against the Romans they killed each other to escape captivity, mothers strangled their children to spare them the indignities of slavery, and prisoners nailed to the cross burst into a chant of victory. The Basques have never been wanting in courage. ”

“ The Basques are a people of great interest to the ethnologist, as the last shrunken remains of that Iberian race that once occupied all Western Europe from Scotland to Portugal and Spain, and, indeed, overleaped the Straits and spread as Kabyles and Berbers in Northern Africa. Although overlapped by other races this Basque element forms the main constituent of the French race in the south-west.
Every cook knows what "stock" is. ”

“ Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa are, with Barcelona and Pontevedra, the most densely populated provinces in Spain. The Basques have a genius for administration which is not to be found in other parts of the Peninsula. Their excellent roads and cleanly kept towns form a striking contrast. They have a true love of local independence, and in the eighteenth century we find two Basque frontier villages, Vera and Sare, styling themselves in a treaty the “two Republics.” ”

“ After so many centuries of close contact and interpenetration with other peoples, we can hardly expect to find a pure physical type among the present Basques. All that we can expect is to be able to differentiate them from their neighbours. The earliest notice we have of the Basques, by Einhard (778) , speaks of their wonderful agility. The next, the pilgrim of the Codex Calixtinus (12th century) , says the Basques are fairer in face (facie candiliores) than the Navarrese.
Anthropologists no longer rely solely on craniology, and the measurement of the skull, to distinguish race. ”

“ One peculiarity of the Basque, and especially of the Tartaro legends, is that the hero of them is so often a madman, an idiot, or a fool. If we can trust our memory, the case is the same in the Slavonic representatives of Odysseus.3 But the Basques seem to dwell upon and to repeat the idea in a peculiar way; they ring the changes on all states, from the wild madman, like the Scandinavian Berserker, through the idiot and fool, to the mere blockhead and ninny. ”

“ The expression “of old” is common on the lips of both French and Spanish Basques; [69] they willingly praise the past, and are intensely conservative of all their customs, their immemorial language, their games, privileges, religion. The ox-carts, with wheels of solid wood, to be seen under the vine-trellises of Basque farms, seem as old as the withered trunk of the oak of Guernica, and similarly many ancient customs have been retained. In some parts, at funerals, the men wear long cloaks reaching to the feet, the women also wearing long, full cloaks with hoods, that completely hide the face. ”

“ Everything tends to show that the Basques are but the remnant of a great people whom we may set down with certainty as the præ-Aryan inhabitants of Spain and a large part of Gaul, and whose range we may, with great probability, extend over Sicily, over part at least of Italy, and perhaps as far north as our own island. Their possible connexion with the early inhabitants of northern Africa hardly concerns us. ”

“ Character.—The most marked features in the Basque character are an intense self-respect, a pride of race and an obstinate conservatism. Much has been written in ridicule of the claim of all Basques to be noble, but it was a fact both in the laws of Spain, in the fueros and in practice. Every Basque freeholder (vecino) could prove himself noble and thus eligible to any office. They are not a town race; a Basque village consists of a few houses; the population lives in scattered habitations. They do not fear solitude, and this makes them excellent emigrants and missionaries. ”

“ The language of the Basques bears no resemblance to any of the Indo-European, nor indeed to any known tongue. It is so difficult, so intricate in construction, that only those who learn it in infancy can ever master it. It is said that, in Basque, "you spell Solomon, and pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." Its antiquity is so great that one legend calls it the "language of the angels," and another says that Tubal brought it to Spain before the lingual disaster at Babel! ”

“ The Basques, moreover, in this respect, present some curious points for study. “In the valley of Roncal the men speak Spanish together; with the women they speak Basque, as do the women to each other. A similar state of things is to be observed at Ochagavia in Salazar. But this custom is not observed in the Roncalese villages of Uztarroz and Isaba, where the men among themselves speak indifferently Basque or Spanish.” (Prince L. L. Bonaparte, “Etudes sur les Dialects d’Aezcoa,” &c., p. 3) . ”

“ The Basques claim to be the oldest race in Europe; and it is now generally acknowledged that they represent the primitive Iberians of Berber stock, who form the fundamental population of all Spain. Many primitive customs survive among them, and one of the most interesting is that by which the eldest daughter in some districts takes precedence over the sons in inheritance. They are a people of the mountains, and to know the Basques you must live in their villages; even their one town, Bilbao, in spite of its industrial and commercial prosperity, is really an overgrown village more than a city. ”

“ Sebastian, and Vittoria; the natives differ considerably from the rest of the Spaniards in race, language, and customs. See Basques.
Basque Roads, an anchorage between the Isle of Oléron and the mainland; famous for a naval victory gained in 1809 over a French fleet under Vice-Admiral Allemand.
Basques, a people of the Western Pyrenees, partly in France and partly in Spain; distinguished from their neighbours only by their speech, which is non-Aryan; a superstitious people, conservative, irascible, ardent, proud, serious in their religious convictions, and pure in their moral conduct. ”

“ Later, but still in the far distant past, the whole of the Iberian peninsula came to be inhabited by the race of men of whom the Basques are the present representatives, but whether they succeeded immediately to the palæolithic savages, or whether some other people came between them, is as yet{5} unknown. The Basques in Europe correspond to the early Egyptians and the light coloured men of the North African coast, so that in speaking of them we are speaking of a race that led the van of civilisation at a very remote period in the history of the world. ”

“ An objection to this theory of secondary origin by intermixture is close at hand. It is fatal to the assumption. It is an important fact that the Basques are relatively broader-headed than even the neighboring peasantry of Beam, and of course even more so than the long-headed Spanish population across the Pyrenees. Turning back to our map on page 620, this will appear. Of course, the Basques are not more extreme in this respect than the pure Alpine type; we mean that they rise in cephalic index above their immediate and adulterated Alpine neighbors in Béarn. ”

“ They have ever been distinguished by simplicity of manners, sturdy honesty, unselfish hospitality, and a spirit of independence which has seldom failed to successfully assert itself against the most persistent attempts at conquest. A mysterious and unknown origin attaches to the Basques, whose strange tongue and weird traditions are supposed to connect them with the original inhabitants of the Peninsula, and who, in this isolated wilderness, have preserved the memory of one of the aboriginal races of Europe. ”

“ BASQUES, a people inhabiting the three Basque Provinces—Biscay, Álava and Guipúzcoa—and Navarre in Spain, and the arrondissement of Bayonne and Mauléon in France. The number of those who can be considered in any sense pure Basques is probably about 600,000 in Europe, with perhaps 100,000 emigrants in the Americas, chiefly in the region of La Plata in South America. The word Basques is historically derived from Vascones, which, written Wascones, has also given the name Gascons to a very different race. ”

“ Everything presages the speedy extinction of the Escuara or Euscara, which is the name given to the Basque by those who speak it. The word, apparently, means merely “manner of speaking.” All people have, in a greater or less degree, the pretension which caused the Greeks to treat all foreigners as barbarians—that is, as not properly-speaking men.
Prince L. L. Bonaparte reckons the actual number of the Basques, not including emigrants established in Mexico, at Monte Video, and at Buenos Ayres, at 800,000, of whom 660,000 are in Spain, and 140,000 in France. ”

“ So the act of the 3rd of June 1876, which assimilated the Basque Provinces to the rest of Spain, acknowledged the true self-government which they had enjoyed for centuries.
The circumstances and methods which enabled the Basques to preserve this independence were, first, the isolation caused by their peculiar language; next, the mountainous and easily-defended nature of the country, its comparative poverty and the possession of a sea-board. Then there were the rights and the safeguards which the fueros themselves gave against encroachments. ”

“ In Europe what population can pretend to purity of blood? The Basques themselves, who apparently ought to be well protected by their country, institutions, and language against the invasion of foreign blood, show upon certain points, in the heart of their mountains, the evident traces of the juxtaposition and fusion of very different races. ”

“ When the old self-sufficient village industries declined, in consequence of the invention of machinery and manufacture elsewhere, the Basques entered at once upon emigration to the agricultural parts of the Americas, and the result has been that the Basque Provinces and the Pays Basque probably have never been more prosperous than they are now, and perhaps a new Eskual-herria and a new Eskuara are being built up in the distant lands to which they are such valued immigrants. ”

“ They maintain in a great measure the picturesque style of dress which prevails in their native land, no matter what their vocation may be here. As a rule, the Basques come with their families, bringing some moderate amount of pecuniary means with them, and at once devote themselves to agricultural pursuits. ”

“ One language group that has been keenly discussed is the Basque group of dialects. The Basques live now on the north and south slopes of the Pyrenees; they number perhaps 600,000 altogether in Europe, and to this day they are a very sturdy and independent-spirited people. Their language, as it exists to-day, is a fully developed one. But it is developed upon lines absolutely different from those of the Aryan languages about it. Basque newspapers have been published in the Argentine and in the United States to supply groups of prosperous emigrants. ”

“ An indefatigable walker, he became familiar with the Basque provinces on both sides of the Pyrénées, and with the Basques themselves, their language, traditions, and poetry. At the same time he grew well versed in French and Spanish, and in all the Pyrenean dialects. ”

“ Octabiano, Roma, and Tiber are far too much like the Latin; for if Greeks and Romans complained, as do Strabo and Mela, of the difficulty of transcribing Basque or Iberian names into their own language, the Basques might possibly find a somewhat corresponding difficulty in transcribing Greek and Latin names into Basque. Moreover, in a later verse appears “Uchin,” a sobriquet for “Augustino,” as a baptismal name in use among the Spanish Basques to this day. What the poem really refers to we dare not assert. ”

“ Indeed, considering the isolation of the Basques, socially, politically, and linguistically, as well as the narrow tract of country into which they have been compressed, it is remarkable that natives of places not forty miles distant from one another are yet mutually unintelligible. ”

“ The Basques never obtained political independence. They were always subjected to Frank or English domination; they passed under the rule of the kings of Navarre and counts of Foix, and finally under the crown of France. Nevertheless they succeeded in maintaining a communal right of self-government, and enjoyed great privileges, notably that of conveying their wares and those of Spain free of duty to the markets of Toulouse and Bordeaux; rights these that awoke the jealousy of the citizens of Bayonne, who were incessantly at feud with them. ”