Exceptions to Their Rule: Basques and Wabanaki in an Age of Autocrats

By Richard S. Sloan

In "Exceptions to Their Rule," Rick Sloan invites readers to embark on a journey back to a world dominated by the iron grip of autocrats. From 1420 to 1620, monarchs, popes, and cardinals, driven by greed and lust for power, left a trail of destruction, decimating indigenous cultures across five continents. But amidst the chaos and devastation, two cultures—the Basques and the Wabanaki—emerged as beacons of hope, embodying the ideals of democracy and self-governance.

The Basques, valiant warriors of their rights, shattered the stone fortresses of autocrats, nurturing a culture that prioritized universal nobility and self-rule. The Wabanaki—Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot—nurtured a cosmology that saw the divine in all things, fostering a society rooted in peace, sharing, and mutual respect.

Sloan presents the fascinating interaction between these two cultures, united in their pursuits of sustainable industry—fishing, whaling, fur trading—and mutual understanding. This extraordinary alliance stands as a testament to the power of cooperation, respect, and common sense, offering a tantalizing glimpse into a path not taken.

Yet, these democratic shoots were fragile, ultimately overshadowed by the might of autocratic forces. "Exceptions to Their Rule" is a compelling tribute to the resilience of the Basques and Wabanaki, reminding us of the enduring struggle between democracy and autocracy and the profound lessons we can learn from history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350905656

Book preview

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Exceptions to Their Rule:Basques and Wabanaki in an Age of Autocrats

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Sherman Sloan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote a brief passage in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35090-564-9

ebook ISBN: 979-8-35090-565-6

Cover photograph:1413 Mecia de Viladestes, Carte marine de l’océan Atlantic Nord-Est, de la Mer Mediterranée, de la mer Noire, de la mer Rouge, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

Printed and bound in the United States

Contents

List of Maps

Foreword by Daniel N. Paul

Foreword by Xabier I. Irujo

Introduction

Who sails to the Bay of Fundy in February 1477? And why?

How did two ancient cultures diverge over a dozen millennia?

Will the Wabanaki and Basque rivers of history meet? And if so, when?

What makes their cosmologies so similar? Yet so different?

What defines universal nobility? What qualifies for universal validity?

Did long-distance trading traditions open up new horizons for harmony?

When a glass pyramid shatters, how far do its deadly shards fly?

How potent was the papacy? And why?

Were cofradías des mareantes the first green shoots of a plebeian democracy?

How did autocrats come to rule England, France, and the Iberian Peninsula?

Can we ever trust oral traditions? Or must we rely only on written records?

Did Columbus catch the last ship to Clarks Harbour, Nova Scotia?

Who gained the most from bribing the future pope, Alexander VI?

Can this circumstantial evidence be ignored completely?

Who fished the Grand Banks even asColumbus sought regal sponsors?

How did spy networks, codes of silence, and royal grants change history?

How does universal validity distinguish the People of the Dawn?

Why did the Basques abandon the Dawnland as the sixteenth century ended?

When did the European invasion of the Dawnland begin?

What caused the Great Dying that so devastated the People of the Dawn?

Did the Basques and Wabanaki tip the autocrats’ inverted pyramids?

Why not?

Acknowledgments

Copyright Permissions

About the Author

Endnotes

Dedicated to

My friends and neighbors along the Pemadumcook chain of lakes, the Penobscot River, and Blue Hill Bay. We are all living on the land of the Penobscot Nation and the Wabanaki Confederacy.

List of Maps

Map 1. Geography of the Basques throughout History

Map 2. Wabanaki Confederacy—Traditional Territory

Map 3. France and the Hundred Years War—1337–1453

Map 4. 1413 Mecia de Viladestes, Carte marine de l’océan Atlantic Nord-Est

Map 5. Cantino Planisphere of 1502

Map 6. Spanish Armada—May to September 1588

Map 7. New France, 1618

Map 8. Wabanaki Confederacy Range

Foreword by

Daniel N. Paul

My history book, We Were Not the Savages, now in its fourth edition, is replete with examples of the worst excesses of unbridled, unrestrained autocrats: the bounties offered for the scalps of Wabanaki men, women, and children by British Colonial Governors, representing the British Crown, in the 1600s and 1700s, and their ongoing breaching of the terms of treaties, negotiated in good faith by indigenous leaders with British colonial governors, throughout the 1800s… the wars of attrition and annihilation during the nineteenth century, starvation and malnutrition caused by food supply destruction… the regulations issued and the legislation enacted that pushed the People across North America to the edge of extinction during the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

That grinding, deadly process of annihilation was driven by a deeply seated racism, an intentional ignorance about our culture, and the soul-blackening corruption that European autocrats and their marionettes exported to these new found lands. Incredibly, that annihilation continued into the twenty-first century as autocratic white supremacists forced our children into residential schools and our adults into dead-end jobs.

Rick Sloan’s book warns us against taking that treacherous trail toward autocracy. It also underscores how fragile democracy was, and still is. When one man with a scepter can send the Spanish Armada to its doom and alter history with his sheer arrogance, it is a teachable moment. When another autocrat attacks his neighbor with all the modern weaponry at his disposal, as Vladimir Putin did in 2022, the absolutely destructive power of unhinged autocrats becomes all too obvious.

In researching and writing Exceptions to Their Rule, Rick Sloan took paths many of us have never traveled, paths even he never knew existed. He saw the patterns of late medieval history being repeated in the twenty-first century. Time and time again, he saw how autocrats amassed and then abused power. He recognized how easily they enriched themselves and how thoroughly they pauperized their own people.

Most disturbing to him, however, was how often they went to war, how long those wars lasted, and how their subjects were sacrificed, repeatedly and needlessly. The autocrats’ narcissism and sheer stupidity produced bloodbaths on land and sea. And, with every technological advancement—from lances to longbows, from crossbows to cannons—the size of those battlefields expanded. Their bloodbaths stained two continents, then three, and finally an entire globe. For instance, in the case of Putin, before his invasion of the country, Russia had a friendly neighbor, Ukraine, whose citizens thought well of Russians. Now most Ukrainians hate Russians. Two friendly neutral neighbors, Finland and Sweden, are seeking membership in NATO and are no longer neutral. He won a lot, didn’t he!

Their incessant invasions claimed more and more lives, just not the gilded lives those autocrats lived. Their infections wiped out entire cultures, forever. Their explorers renamed centuries-old places and erased indigenous peoples from their maps. Their abettors claimed the lands they found, stole their vast resources, and brutally massacred their original inhabitants. For the autocrats’ greed knew no bounds, save the religious monopolies they were granted by papal fiat.

But his book is not about ancient history. Today, even liberal democracies are facing increasing levels of toxic polarization—often the precursors to autocratic take-overs—hundreds of millions of human beings are at risk.¹ And autocrats are their most powerful, home-grown adversaries.

Rick also explores how the Wabanaki Confederacy, and my own country of Mi’kma’ki’, nourished the tiniest, greenest shoots of democracy. He studied how those shoots took root, grew into mature plants, withered with the seasons, and then flowered anew. Our ancestors climbed mountainous paths upwards toward liberty and freedom and then were driven down treacherous trails that led to enslavement, exploitation, and mass executions. And yet, our oral traditions kept alive the premise and the promise of what some now call our speaking democracy, a process of reaching consensus by listening to the voices of all, women and men alike.

And while I do not agree with every word Rick Sloan has written, and neither will his readers, he shares with us a history that we were never taught. Instead we were fed a sanitized version of the evils they loosened on their lands and ours. As corrupting as the acts of the autocrats were, those pseudo-histories airbrushed away their crimes against humanity. But Rick is absolutely correct in that we—the Wabanaki and the Basques—were exceptions to those autocrats’ rule.

Allow me a moment to explain why I can make that assertion. The Mi’kmaq of the Wabanaki Confederacy spoke about dictators and democracy every time the People chose a new chief. An Elder stood up at the council fires and reminded those gathered of the ancient Sunrises when cruel and uncaring men governed the nation. In my only novel, Chief Lightning Bolt, I recounted the legend of the Despotic Dictators. I laid out the case against the autocrats who bedeviled our nation for uncounted centuries:

They forced citizens on pain of death, or barbaric punishments, to obey and carry out their commands. For the slightest infraction, people were tortured, and a favorite pastime was ordering the death penalty for minor as well as major infractions.

Thus abused constantly, the People lived in terror and silently prayed to the Great Spirit for deliverance from their tormentors.Generation after generation, they kept the faith and continued to believe that some Sunrise the Father would respond. However, after the passage of thousands of Moons, many were despairing of ever being rid of them.

The Great Spirit, after watching with a heavy heart the mistreatment of succeeding generations of the People, and hoping they would find a way to revolt and overcome, finally decided they would never be rid of their persecutors without His help.

After a bitterly cold winter during which the dictators forced each wigwam to give up most of their warm furs and a third of their food caches, my main character met with other warriors who also

believed in their hearts that all human beings were created equal and that everyone should receive equal treatment. When asked if they would join him to overthrow the Dictators, they readily agreed. The Great Spirit, watching the progress, was overjoyed that the first seeds of democratic principles had finally taken root in the minds of some of the ruling class…

The outcome seemed pre-ordained. The Dictator’s army was "ill-prepared to mount any kind of defense… [and] the fight for freedom was won with very little bloodshed." The Dictators were tried, "convicted of committing crimes against humanity and sentenced to be executed at the end of two Seasons if they did not repent." So, it is no wonder that the Mi’kmaq People do not suffer fools when picking leaders.²

And while the story was set in the fifteenth century, I was writing for the twenty-first century. The autocrats held the upper hand, then and now. Yet the power, the real power, rested with the People, in Mi’kma’ki and across North America, way back when and still today.

My fictional account, unabashedly a novel, began well before contact with Europeans. For it told the story of how a Mi’kmaq man with leadership attributes was expected to live his life, with honor and humility. Each chapter represented a different phase of his life—the customs and traditions he was expected to observe and uphold, the actions he would take, and the values he would cherish and try to always embody.³ This fictional character offered an exemplar of what it takes to defeat the autocrats and secure a sustainable democracy.

As Mark Twain once wrote, The truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. The possibilities explored in Exceptions to Their Rule offer us a chance to contemplate what was, what might have been, and what still could be… if we valued honor and humility… and if we recognized that of the Great Spirit in all things, animate and inanimate.

Daniel N. Paul

January 25, 2023

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Order of Canada (2005)

Order of Nova Scotia (2002)

Université Sainte-Anne, honorary Doctor of Letters degree (1997)

Dalhousie University, honorary law degree (2013)

Grand Chief Donald Marshall Memorial Elder Award (2007)

Author of We Were Not the Savages: The Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Fourth Edition) (2022) and Chief Lightning Bolt (2017). On June 23, 2023, Mi’kmaw Elder Daniel N. Paul died following a battle with cancer. In an email to friends the previous autumn, Danny wrote, I do hope that younger generations will pick up the torch and keep going, teaching and preaching the truth for many generations to come.

Foreword by

Xabier I. Irujo

On April 26, 1937, the small Basque town of Gernika was bombed. Thousands of people died that day. Hundreds of thousands had already been murdered, in China, Ethiopia, and other parts of the world during the prior six years. Millions more were slain over the next eight years as the global conflagration that was lit by the armed forces of autocrats spread and grew into World War II.

And yet Gernika was unique. It was a Beta test for future air assaults on civilian populations and was meant as a belated birthday present for Adolph Hitler. But it was also a calculated attack on the Basques’ symbol of democracy and independence: a deliberate desecration of an ancient oak tree. Or, more accurately, a dynasty of oak trees.

It has been said that the Basques had laws before they had kings. Beginning in the seventh century, the Basques had governed themselves while sitting under those oaks. Their fueros, their laws and liberties, were hammered out in discussions by Basque citizens in open assemblies. And when monarchs were invented in Europe, for centuries kings, queens, and emperors had traveled to Gernika and many other towns and cities in the Basque Country to kneel and swear to respect their democratic traditions. Tyrants were told under these trees: Remember, king, that you are not better than any one of us, and that we all are better than you.

Even King Ferdinand of Aragon, the consort to Queen Isabella of Castile, had sworn to protect Basque liberties. But more modern autocrats—the German Reichchancellor, Adolf Hitler; the Italian Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini; Spain’s Caudillo, Francisco Franco; and the Primate of Spain, Isadro Goma y Tomas—sought to make the rubble bounce. And so it did.

In the two-hundred-minute attack, between 31 and 46 tons of bombs were dropped on Gernika. The city center was totally razed. Over 270 buildings were completely destroyed. And 1,654 Basques died; that figure does not include those buried alive under 60,000 cubic meters of rubble or incinerated by incendiary bombs. The air forces of darkness somehow missed any structure of military value.

They missed the Gernikako Arbola, or the Tree of Gernika. This was not a miracle, but a calculated means of propaganda. The first Spanish and Italian soldiers arriving in Gernika were ordered to stand before the tree and a photograph was taken. Next morning, the press controlled by the Caudillo spread the news: Gernika was not bombed, it was set afire by the Basques themselves… However, what the reds burn, Franco preserves. And the photo of two of his soldiers guarding the tree refined the pamphlet.

Eighty-six long years have passed, and the dynasty of democracy still stands unbowed.

I do not agree with everything Rick Sloan has written. But he does get his major point across: Kings, queens, and tyrants of all colors have been the bane of human existence since time immemorial. And even more so today.

As bombs and rockets fall on cities across Ukraine, autocracy is on the march once again. The Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, warns us that dictatorships are on the rise and harbor 70 [percent] of the world population—5.4 billion people.⁴ The number of closed autocracies, countries like Belarus, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, have grown from twenty-five to thirty just in the last two years. The electoral autocracies, countries like India, Nigeria, and Tunisia, now number sixty nations. Thirty-five more nations face significant deterioration in freedom of expression at the hands of governments. And thirty-two are experiencing the toxic polarization that often prefigures the rise of autocrats.⁵

And yet, the green shoots of democracy, as evidenced by the histories and traditions of the Basques and the Wabanaki in this book, are the not-so-fragile expressions of the human spirit. To the men and women who have tasted freedom, who have fought for their liberties, and who have governed themselves, democracy is not a dirty word. It defines who they are: small-d democrats, as Sloan puts it. And to them, as it was to the citizens of Gernika, autocracy was and remains anathema.

The People of the Pyrenees’ six-century fight to preserve their human rights and their fealty to democracy did not end when the incendiary bombs were finally extinguished on April 29, 1937. It continued for another thirty-eight years until the death of the last dictator who thought, mistakenly so, that terror from on high might prevail.

Exceptions to Their Rule: Basques and Wabanaki in an Age of Autocrats demonstrates that democracy, like Gernika’s oaks, is a dynasty worth nourishing and preserving for all time.

Xabier Irujo, Ph.D.

April 6, 2023

Reno, Nevada

Chair, Center for Basque Studies

University of Nevada Reno

Professor, Genocide Studies

Ph.D., political philosophy, University of the Basque Country, 2011

Ph.D., history, State University of Navarre, 2004

Recent Books

The Bombing of Gernika. Buenos Aires: Ekin, 2021. https://library.unr.edu/locations-and-spaces/basque-library/gernika/downloads

Atlas de los bombardeos en Euskadi (1936–1937). Bilbao: Gogora Institute, 2021. https://www.gogora.euskadi.eus/contenidos/informacion/gogora_dokumentuak/es_def/atlas-bombardeos.pdf

"Arrasaré Vizcaya," 2.000 bombardeos en Euskadi (1936–1937). Bilbao: University of the Basque Country Press, 2020.

Gernika: Genealogy of a Lie. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2018.

Gernika: 26 de abril de 1937. Barcelona: Critica, 2017.

Gernika 1937: The Market Day Massacre. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015.

Introduction

What happens when two cultures collide? Two nations? Or even two strangers? Are their reactions conditioned by decades of personal experience, centuries of actions taken by their ancestors, or millennia of lessons learned from trial and error? Is the outcome predetermined? Or is there space for a novel reaction besides the deeply ingrained threesome of freeze, flight, or fight?

I began researching this book with questions. My ignorance was so vast, that’s all I really had—questions, hundreds of questions. To understand two centuries of contacts between two unique cultures, the questions have to probe deeper and recover ground that historians, archeologists, ethnologists, and indigenous elders have plowed many times. Even then, the questions only multiply.

Sorry, I cannot offer readers an authoritative voice. That would be presumptuous. I am not an academician, just a political strategist. After years of researching and reading the works of men and women of real genius on the period stretching from 1420 to 1620, my ignorance remains virtually untouched. However, my fifty-year career in politics gives me one slight advantage. To see the trends in upcoming election cycles, I had to go back in time—often ten or more presidential elections. To see the momentum behind change and the stability of the status quo, I studied election statistics, read deeply about prior eras, and sought to understand the policies of past presidents. Two examples will suffice. First, in The Gift of Strategy, self-published in 1995, I argued that Bill Clinton—or any future occupant of the Oval Office—needed to become a strategic president… he needed to think deeply about the challenges America will face in the coming decades… [and] devise his own strategy for meeting one or two of those challenges. To my utter shock, the phrase meeting America’s challenges or some variation occurred fifty-one times in President Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union Speech.

The second example is A Novel Approach to the American Dream, self-published in 2019. After reading two thousand presidential speeches with that iconic phrase, I understood how thirteen presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama, had built upon the successes of their predecessors. I learned how the spiraling upward momentum of the Dream took hold and how good public policy trumped the angry politics of their campaigns. So, I placed all thirteen men in the Blue Room of the White House and directly beneath the Oval Office. There they explained how their immediate predecessor used the phrase, and then negotiated a more robust, more future-oriented American Dream. With more literary license than political science, they ended an existential threat to the country they loved. Published in 2019, that book concluded with bells pealing across the country as that real threat to our Republic was defeated. And, lo-and-behold, on the day AP News called the 2020 election for Joe Biden, the bells of the National Cathedral rang.

Success bred success. That same approach in researching and writing applied to this book: I went backwards to go forward.

As you might imagine, the further back I went, the more questions occurred to me. I explored more than a few historic rabbit warrens. So, too, were the alternative theories of who did what to whom and when. The men and women trying to pierce the darkness of the distant past did the best they could with the information then available to them. Some had an agenda; most did not. But it was their voices that will echo throughout this book, not mine. They, too, ended up with more questions than answers. Even when their prose came across as authoritative and their conclusions smacked of certitude, they knew that they never could defend them adequately. Nor can I.

Four themes, however, became clear to me. First, never underestimate the intellectual powers and physical prowess of any plebeian culture—and certainly not the Wabanaki or the Basque cultures. The everyday men and women of their cultures were not bit players in history. They were the brains and brawn behind the actions (and reactions) so often attributed to more privileged classes. Because their names are unknown to us, because their jobs appear so menial, and because their lives are so short and brutal does not mean they were nobodies. It means we have failed to understand their contributions to their own cultures, cultures that they and their ancestors carved, literally, out of stone. As we shall see, the People of the Pyrenees and the People of the Dawn were not savages but savants attempting to build a rational, workable, small-d democratic Eden for themselves and future generations… on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Beginning in the thirteenth century, Basque seamen organized themselves into cofradías de mareantes or brotherhoods, a cross between a modern-day labor union and a farmer’s cooperative. Their oceangoing cogs and caravels left for three to five months, and returned with tons of whale oil or cod to be auctioned. Since these brotherhoods lined the Cantabrian Sea and the Bay of Biscay—from the northwest tip of today’s Spain, across the Basque Country, and through the Duchy of Aquitaine—hundreds of boats and thousands of men and women were involved. They were sophisticated, shrewd, and successful. Built on solidarity, linked horizontally to the iron, shipbuilding, mule-skinning, and chandler brotherhoods, their cofradías were powerful. Later, each cofradía connected vertically to the navigators’ and masters’ cofradías and then to the owners, insurers, and bankers.

And yet, it was the local church or hermitage that served as the hub for each cofradía and, as long as the cofradía survived, both entities prospered. Through three centuries of warfare on land and sea, recurrent plagues, cutthroat competition, and, yes, royal taxes and religious tithes, most grew in size and economic clout. For the late-medieval miracle of the loaves and fishes reoccurred every year: the fishes multiplied and the bread spread throughout local economies.

The second theme deals with corruption. For a political strategist, it seems so trite to talk about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yet, in decade after decade, first across the evolving nation states of Europe and then across the incipient confederacies and fragile colonies throughout the Americas, the almost absolute power of kings and queens, popes and cardinals, admirals and generals corrupted all they touched. Their own religious beliefs, their own sworn oaths, their own ideas, ideals, and initiatives, their own families, religious orders, and liege networks, their own family legacies, all rotted to the core. A pernicious, persistent corruption swept like the Black Plague through castles and cathedrals, armed camps, and warships. In its path of destruction, millions of Europeans and Amerindians died, so a few autocrats might savor the acrid taste of their absolute and eternal corruption on their own deathbeds.

The most insidious example of absolute power at work was the papal bulls issued to confirm the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas that Spain and Portugal reached in 1493. Its line of demarcation, the line carving the world into two monopolistic spheres of religious and economic hegemony, moved almost a thousand miles in papal bulls dated on sequential days but crafted months apart. The treaty drew a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verdes, instead of its original 100 leagues. That line gave Spain dominion over all lands and islands towards the west of 46° 30’. And yet, Portugal preserved its monopolies over sub-Saharan Africa all the way to the indies. The insidious part was that those papal bulls also secured Portugal’s monopoly of the slave trade, a trade that saw 11.9 million Africans transported to the Western Hemisphere.

Because of the machinations of Christopher Columbus, the new Tordesillas meridian carved out for the Portuguese the country now called Brazil, which was not officially invaded by Pedro Alvares Cabral and claimed for Portugal until 1500. That line gave Greenland’s Eastern Settlement to Portugal, but its Western Settlement went to Spain. Abandoned by the Norse two centuries earlier, the Eastern Settlement offered Portugal a choke-point for the mythical northwest passage. And we thought gerrymandering began in the eighteenth century, not the fifteenth century? Silly us.

By 1493, the race to explore the northwestern Atlantic was already in its second—or, as we will learn, its third or fourth—decade. That trackless ocean was being crisscrossed by ships of Castile, Portugal, France, England, and Denmark. Some monarchs wanted to replicate what Ferdinand and Isabella were doing—exploiting the newly found lands to fill their treasuries with gold, silver, pearls, and the proceeds from enslaving indigenous peoples. Others tried to copy Portugal’s João II’s strategy—searching for the fastest trading routes to India and China and transporting slaves to the Western Hemisphere and Europe. And yet, even as those voyages of exploration occurred, whaling and fishing fleets left their ports and headed for the waters of Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Maine. In far greater numbers than the world-famous admirals in an age of autocrats, the less exalted, more plebeian navigators and seamen made first contacts with the indigenous peoples of the northwestern Atlantic.

In ways profoundly different from the royally sanctioned and often financed voyages of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these unheralded fishing and whaling excursions built seasonal, albeit industrial-level, extraction and processing encampments. They traded with, spoke with, worked with, and lived with the first peoples they encountered. For more than a century and, perhaps, even longer, these close encounters did not lead to the plagues, wars, and massacres that decimated native populations from the tip of Cape Horn to the Great Lakes. Not until 1616 to 1619 did the Great Dying, which had already claimed 70 million lives by then, reach New England and the Canadian Maritimes.

The third theme was this: Christopher Columbus wasn’t the first, nor even the hundredth European to reach the Americas. He was, however, the first to enslave indigenous people on two continents. He was the first to lie to his sovereigns about who he was and what he had done, even as he appealed for their financial support. And he was the first to weave a web of lies about sailing west into the setting sun. The lies about being there before, that fisherman’s tale, as one Harvard historian called it, turned out to be true.

Columbus had his reasons for prevaricating… until his lies caught up to him. The man was not from Genoa. He was not a devout Catholic. He was not an apprentice mapmaker nor the son of a wool merchant. And he was certainly not the saint some thought he ought to be. Instead, he was a Converso, the son of a Jewish woman from Valencia, who had converted to Catholicism under duress. He was a corsair, a pirate, who fought against then-Prince Ferdinand of Aragon’s ships. A few years later, he sank an armed Genoese cargo ship off Cape St. Vincent. Columbus was a polymath, who knew how to use the symbols of the Ephemerides, an astrolabe, and the newest tools of navigation. He was multilingual, spoke and read four languages, but not Italian. Columbus’s ambitions were as gigantic as his ego was. And the masks he used to protect his identity were as impenetrable as the fictions he wove throughout his career.

The fourth and final theme was the exceptionalism of both cultures. The intellectual dynamism, the exquisite cosmology, and the dialogical democracy exercised by and for the People of the Dawn caught my attention first. But the Wabanaki’s universal validity, a concept promoted by Immanuel Kant, amazed me the most. Their accomplishments equaled, if not exceeded, those of the People of the Pyrenees. The Basques began with an advantage. Their inherent courage, incredible seamanship, intellectual leadership, and their representative democracy allowed them to govern themselves at home and aboard ship. Those specific traits gave this book its title. The Basques and Wabanaki were the two exceptions to their rule. They were the antithesis of, and anathema to, the autocrats who stole and murdered and enslaved their way across a now global stage.

There is, however, a subtext to these four themes. For a brief period, less than seventy years and certainly not more than a hundred and fifty years, the People of the Pyrenees and the People of the Dawn provided a stark contrast to what was to come. Exhibiting a nobility of purpose and spirit, they met and ate and talked and traded man-to-man as equals. Developing a pidgin trading language composed of Algonquin and Basque words, they worked side-by-side building the try pots where whale fat bubbled and the lattice-work of branches that dried cod catches faster. Together, they created a transoceanic trading network that sent beaver skins, whale oil, and fish eastward and cloth and beads, copper and iron goods westbound. They learned quickly from each other and adapted to the newfangled items used and traded. Over the course of those seven to fifteen decades, they dealt with each other as brothers, as friends, as members of the family.

Perhaps, the People of the Pyrenees and People of the Dawn trusted each other; respected each other’s traditions and very different life experiences; and lived in harmony. Clearly, they used reciprocity to achieve justice, made fair trade agreements, and kept them. They must have forgiven and forgotten the insults and injustices that the clash of cultures can engender. Laughing at each other’s foibles and celebrating each other’s victories, they walked the paths through the forests, paddled the rivers and lakes, and sailed the bays and oceans side-by-side.

Pollyannaish? Again, perhaps. But this I learned: They pulled it off. How they did it remains one of my unanswered questions, a question that readers will have to puzzle over for themselves. The Basques and the Wabanaki left bread crumbs for those who might seek the universal nobility of mankind and the peace of mind it once produced along the coasts of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. And, if men and women who are far wiser than I ask the right questions, they can reproduce those long-gone spirits of friendship and brotherhood six centuries later.

Map 1. Geography of the Basques throughout History. The Basque

language, Euskara, was spoken from Bordeaux, France, to Burgos, Spain, in the first century. Since then. it has retreated to an area from Bayonne, France, to Bilbao, Spain.⁶

Map 2. Wabanaki Confederacy—Traditional Territory. The ancestral homelands of the Wabanaki Confederacy included today’s Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in Canada, and all of the state of Maine. ⁷

Chapter 1.

Who sails to the Bay of Fundy in

February 1477? And why?

On February 13, 1477, a navigator stood on a sandy rise at the southernmost point of Kespukwitk, one of the seven districts of Mi’kma’ki, and an integral part of the Wabanaki Confederacy.⁸ He wasn’t the first European to come ashore. Nor was he the last. But to generations of what he called indians and savages, he became the most infamous one of all. That infamy came later. For on that February day, he was far more interested in an eclipse than exploring an icy island.

So, facing southwest, he scanned the sky. Soon enough, the moon interrupted his unobstructed view of the midwinter afternoon sun. As the moon reached its maximum apogee, a ring of fire may have appeared around its rim. For this navigator was no casual observer. He evidently had access to Johannes Müller’s 750-page Ephemerides, its fourteen handmade paper leaves for 1477 or, perhaps, only the single line of symbols and numbers that had predicted, precisely, the date of this solar eclipse four years earlier. Carrying the tools of his new trade—an astrolabe, a quadrant, and, possibly, a cross-staff—he sought to measure the angles of bright stars, the moon, and the sun in order to determine his location. Like many navigators in the late fifteenth century, he was acutely aware of the latest advances in astronomy and mathematics and their impact on the precision of navigation.

For the Ephemerides the navigator carried to sea for over thirty years was produced by Johannes Müller, best known to history as Regiomontanus. A polymath and astronomer, Müller had helped to translate Ptolemy’s Almagest, reinvigorated trigonometry with his book De Triangles omnimodus including its tables for cosines, taught that longitude at sea could be determined by lunar distances, studied seven solar eclipses in depth, and observed Halley’s Comet. Dead by age forty, in Scipta Müller described the instruments he used: quadrants, astrolabes, armillary spheres, parallactic rulers, and Jacob’s staffs. As their precision improved and Müller’s equations were refined, his work guided the fates of navigators and their ships for the next five hundred years.

For the navigator at Clarks Harbour, Nova Scotia, already knew his latitude by taking a reading of the North Star. But the angles measured during the eclipse, the angles recorded on terra firma instead of a ship’s rolling deck, gave him longitude, elapsed time, and even distance.⁹ And, if he was as accurate as Johannes Müller had been, he could tell the time the eclipse started, the beginning of its totality, its total duration, and do so with an accuracy of just over 7 minutes.¹⁰ Once back aboard the ship or even back in his home port of Lisbon, with his copy of the Ephemerides in hand, the navigator could both compare his angles with those printed by Johannes Müller, King Alphonso X of Castile, or other astronomers. He would have known within 18 miles where on Earth he had been when he first saw that ring of fire.

Everything beyond the eclipse itself, the Ephemerides, and Johannes Müller’s accomplishments, is conjecture. For history and historians have been justifiably harsh on that navigator. Often his treatment was because of his own actions, including lying to his crews about their progress and locations, exaggerating his discoveries in dispatches to his sovereigns, kidnapping tribal leaders by ruse and then overwhelming them by force, capturing and then selling hundreds of natives into slavery, and raining death and destruction on unsuspecting and defenseless cultures.

And yet, it was the inherent secrecy of his initial voyages, the paucity of written records backing up his often outrageous claims, and the multiplicity of competing national interests that frustrated his historians and biographers. Even the simplest of questions lacked solid answers. Who was this navigator? How did he get to Clarks Harbour? Why was Clarks Harbour chosen? Why was he sent there? And by whom? What was he expected to do? Who did he encounter? Who sailed with him? And why, if this eclipse was so momentous an event as to risk a caravel and its crew members in arctic conditions, was a twenty-six-year-old former wool merchant and recent survivor of naval cannon fire given such enormous responsibility?

Or was this just another ruse by a navigator named Christopher Columbus, Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón, or Xpoual de Colon? Only three brief sentences refer to this early voyage in his son’s hagiography.¹¹ As quoted by the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison:

I sailed in the year 1477, the month of February, a hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile, whose northern part is in latitude 73 ° N and not 63 ° as some would have it be; nor does it lie on the meridian where Ptolemy says the west begins, but much farther west. And to this island, which is as big as England, come English with their merchandise, especially they of Bristol. And at the season when I was there the sea was not frozen, but the tides were so great that in some places that it rose to 26 braccia, and fell as much in depth.¹²

The highest tides in the world are found in the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.¹³ But Morison dismissed this ‘whopper’ on the tides as just that—a fisherman’s fabrication. In Columbus’s day, Morison wrote, anything was possible, and every apparent monster or marvel was reported.¹⁴ As a Harvard University professor for forty years, a rear admiral (retired) in the United States Navy because of his service during World War II, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Morison’s judgments on nautical history were beyond reproach.

Doubts remain about Morison’s conclusions and Columbus’s assertions. But two facts are beyond dispute. First, a hybrid eclipse occurred on February 13, 1477, and was visible in the northern hemisphere. Second, Johannes Müller’s Ephemerides predicted that eclipse at least four years earlier. Both facts are established by credible sources. The National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) devised a Solar Eclipse Search Engine for its Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses. Its Hybrid Solar Eclipse of 1477 on February 13 tells us the instant of greatest eclipse, its magnitude, and its lunar radius or penumbra. NASA also pinpoints not only when it started but when its partial eclipse ended. And NASA provides us with the total and annular path taken by the only eclipse that could be seen from Clarks Harbour in 1477. ¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²²

And, if you visit the Philosophical Research Society Library in Los Angeles, you can see an original edition of Johannes Müller’s astronomical almanac consisting of tables showing the position of celestial bodies during a number of dates in a regular sequence. They show the future position of the sun, moon, planets, comets and eclipses.²³ The PRS library’s copy of Ephemerides was published in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1474. The library website explains:

the Ephemerides of Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller) were regarded as the most authentic of their time. This ephemeris for 1477 consists of fourteen unnumbered leaves printed on handmade paper. It is very rare; complete copies are virtually unknown. The Ephemerides of Regiomontanus are believed to have been used by Christopher Columbus. They guided him on his journey to the New World and enabled him to predict the lunar eclipse of 1504, which astonished the Indigenous peoples. They were so impressed by his prediction that they agreed to provide his crew with much needed food.²⁴

The Ephemerides, however, was not created for a conjurer’s trick. Rather, it was meant as the latest and most scientific predictor of the movements of the stars, a reference book for astronomers, astrologers, and navigators. Its precision, while still imperfect, built upon centuries of work by the greatest minds across the cultures found around the Mediterranean Sea.

During his lifetime, Johannes Müller