Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 / Volume 1, Number 12

by Unknown

The Ancient Iberians.

THEIR STATION IN CANADA DESCRIBED BY THE REV. W. H. H. MURRAY.—A PSYCHOMETRIC REPORT ON AN ANCIENT RACE.

The Rev. W. H. H. Murray, the eloquent minister who was once so conspicuous in Boston, on a yacht excursion to Canada recently wrote from Tadousac to the Boston Herald as follows:

“At that point of time touched by the earliest ray of historic knowledge, the eye of the student of human annals sees, occupying the Spanish peninsula, a race of men called Iberians. These old Iberians were not a tribe or clan, but a people, numerous and potential, with a fully developed and virile language, skilled in arms and the working of precious metals, and industriously commercial. This much can be clearly inferred from the extent of their territory and the remnant of them, with their characteristics and habits, which still remain. This old people, themselves a colony from some other country, once existent and highly civilized in the remote past, spread from the Mediterranean Sea to the slopes of the Pyrenees, and all over southern Gaul as far as the Rhone, and flowed westward with a movement so forceful that it included all the British Islands. All this happened 4000 to 5000 B. C. They are older than the Egyptians probably by 1000 years, and were strong enough to attempt the conquest of the known world.

“These Iberians colonized Sicily. They were the original settlers in Italy and pushed their way northward as far as Norway and Sweden, where can still be found among the present inhabitants their physical characteristics—dark skin and jet black hair. This ancient people were not barbarians, but highly civilized. They had the art of writing and a literature. Poetry was cultivated. Their laws were set in verse; and for these laws thus written they claimed an antiquity of 6000 years.

“This ancient race has passed away, as all great races do. The rise and decline of a people are as a day. They have a sunrise, a noon, a sunset, and there remains of them and their splendor nothing but a gloaming, a twilight of a thousand years, perhaps, and after that

OBLIVION’S STARLESS NIGHT.

“This old Iberian, world-conquering race came to its sunset hour a thousand years ago, and the gloaming after their sunset is deepening into that gloom which hides all. Only a remnant, a hint of the old-time radiance, remains up to this day.

“In Southern Europe, the remnant of this antique race, the fragment of a root with the old-time vigorous sap in it, may still be found. There, on the Spanish peninsula where its cradle was rocked, the grave of a once powerful race is being slowly sodded; for there still live that strange people called the Basques. It matters not today what they are—chiefly mountaineers, I think—but they are of the old Iberian stock, and the Iberians were colonists from some unknown land, pre-historic, undiscoverable by us. Colonists and colonizers also. From some unknown land, hidden from us in the gloom of ages, these Iberians came to Southern Europe in ships. To Sicily they went in ships; to Britain and Ireland; to Norway also, and where else, or how far or for what, is left to conjecture. But being strong in numbers, ambitious to conquer, skilled in navigation, we can well believe that they pushed their flag and commerce nigh to the ends of the world.

“Now these Basques, to-day mountaineers, they tell me, were once, nor long ago, great sailors. In instinct and habit, they were true to the old Iberian stock, to which they were as the last green leaf on a dying tree. They were of a world-conquering race, and they sailed the seas of the world, seeking profit fearlessly. Four hundred years ago Jacques Cartier, himself a Breton, with the old Basque or Iberian blood warm in him—for the Bretons were of the old Iberian stock, with the same temper and look of face—sailed into the gulf of the St. Lawrence, and found—what?

THE BASQUES BEFORE HIM.

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

BEFORE COLUMBUS WAS BORN,

a little group of men, Basques by name, then living in southern Europe, a remnant of the old Iberian race, anchored their ships in the same harbor in the month of August annually. Only half a mile to the west of me, the Saguenay, whose bottom is one hundred fathoms deeper down than the bed of the St. Lawrence, pours its gloomy current between the stupendous cliffs of rock which make for its resistless passage an awful portal. These monstrous cliffs of bare, gray rock have not changed in form or color or appearance since some force, next to that of the Almighty, lifted them from the under world and placed them to stand eternal sentinels at the entrance to this strange, impressive, awe-inspiring river—for the wind and wear of unnumbered centuries have left them cold and bare, soilless and treeless, save where some stunted shrub, with a single root, has spiked itself into a crevice, and there stands starved and dying, as it lives its withered life.

“As it is to-night to eye and ear, so was it centuries ago; and so the old Basque whalers saw it while yet the great continent to the west was a trackless wilderness from ocean to ocean and gulf to gulf. And Columbus and Jacques Cartier and Champlain were not, by five hundred years, yet born.

“The harbor of Tadousac is a basin shaped like a sickle. On the west the mountain wall of the Saguenay protects it. The eastern curve is sheltered by vast sand lanes, scoured from the sea bottom and whirled upward by some mighty eddy in geologic ages. To the north are mountains of stone, their gray surface flecked here and there by stunted fir and cedar or dwarfed birches. Between these mountains of rock and the water of the harbor or basin is a short, narrow plateau, lifted some fifty feet above the water line, every foot of which is historic to a degree. On no other bit of ground of equal size on the American continent has so much been done and suffered which can interest the curious, touch the sensibilities, or kindle the imagination and fan it into flame.

There is reason to think that before the Christ was born the old Iberian ships were here; and their descendants, the Basques, continued the commerce which their progenitors had established and which rendezvoused here 1,500 years after the Galilean name had conquered kingdoms and empires. The Norsemen were here, we know, a thousand years ago, and many a night the old sea kings of the north drank out of their mighty drinking horns good health to distant ones and honors to Thor and Odin. Then, late enough to have his coming known to letters, and hence recorded, Jacques Cartier came, himself a Breton, and hence cousin in blood to the Basque whalers, whom he found here engaged in a pursuit which their race had followed before Rome was founded or Greece was born, before Jerusalem was builded, or even Egypt, perhaps, planted as a colony. St. Augustine, Plymouth rock, Quebec—these are mushroom growths, creations of yesterday, traditionless, without a legend and without a fame, beside this harbor of Tadousac, whose history, along a thin but strong cord of sequence, can be traced backward for a thousand years, and whose connection with Europe is older than the name!