www.naBASQUE.org

James Axtell writes that the oldest pidgin language in North America between Europeans and Indians was that which originated with the exchanges of Basques and Native Americans in the 16th century of eastern Canada.

"The oldest pidgin in eastern North America and one of the most durable was born on the hard coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence early in the sixteenth century when Basque fishermen and whalers worked, traded, and ate with local Micmacs and Montagnais and possibly visiting Inuits.

A pidgin (pronounced /ˈpɪdʒɪn/) language is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups).

"Since their languages were' completely different," testified a group of Basque fishermen in 1710, "they created a form of lingua franca composed of Basque and two different languages of the Indians, by means of which they could understand each other quite well." When the codfishers greeted their Montagnais helpers each year, they asked them in Basque "Nola zaude?" (How are you?), to which the natives replied politely, "Apaizak hobeto" (The priests are better)."

James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America. (Oxford, 2001): 57.

In the past thirty years historians have come to realize that the shape and temper of early America was determined as much by its Indian natives as it was by its European colonizers. No one has done more to discover and recount this story than James Axtell, one of America's premier ethnohistorians. Natives and Newcomers is a collection of fifteen of his best and most influential essays, available for the first time in one volume. In accessible and often witty prose, Axtell describes the major encounters between Indians and Europeans--first contacts, communications, epidemics, trade and gift-giving, social and sexual mingling, work, cultural and religious conversions, military clashes--and probes their short--and long-term consequences for both cultures. The result is a book that shows how encounters between Indians and Europeans ultimately led to the birth of a distinctly American identity.

"The cod, of course, were called bacail/os or bakalaos even by the local Micmacs, whose own name for them was apege. Four hundred years later, two words of Basque origin are still used by Micmac-speakers: atlai, "shirt" (from Basque atorra; modern Micmac has no "r") and elege, "king" (from Basque errege)."

Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World begins with the mysterious medieval source of the codfish, in the fishing vessels of an equally mysterious people, the Basque. Cod was sometimes caught closer to the Continent, but never in such vast numbers as the Basque supplied.
     Catholicism gave the Basques their great opportunity. The medieval church imposed fast days in which sex and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold foods" was permitted... In total, meat was forbidden for almost half the days of the year, and those lean days became salt cod days...The Basques were getting richer every Friday. But where was all this cod coming from? The Basques, who had never even said where they came from, kept their secret.
     To follow the Basque to their secret source of cod became a goal of money-seeking adventurers. In 1475, following the successful attempt by the Hanseatic League to cut Bristol off from Icelandic cod, Thomas Croft went into partnership with John Jay to find the island in the Atlantic called Hy-Brasil, believed to be the source of Basque cod. They found enough (although they never revealed where) to leave them uninterested when the Hanseatics tried to negotiate to reopen the Iceland trade with Bristol in 1490. Interestingly, their cod ...arrived in Bristol dried, and drying cannot be done on a ship deck.... a letter has recently been discovered...sent to Christopher Columbus, a decade after the Croft affair in Bristol... [The letter] alleged that [Columbus] knew perfectly well they had been to America already... Fishermen were keeping their secrets, while explorers were telling the world.
     Not to miss this point, Kurlansky cites two other explorers who "claimed" shores in the New World for various governments. John Cabot (nee Giovanni Caboto, of Genoa), claimed "New Found Land" for Henry VII, and reported as part of its wealth rocky coastlines suitable for drying the cod that teamed in its waters. When Jacques Cartier "discovered" the mouth of the St. Lawrence and claimed the Gaspé Peninsula for France, he found 1000 Basque fishing vessels already there.
    But the Basques, wanting to keep a good secret, had never claimed it for anyone.

Online review source: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/kurlansky-codthe-fish-that-changed-the/

When French colonists arrived in Acadia in 1604 and founded Quebec four years later, the language of the coastal tribes, noted one observer, with only small exaggeration, was "half Basque" and had been for a long time.

Depending upon how they were treated, natives uttered such Basque phrases as "Endia chave normandia" (The French know many things) and "Maloes mercateria" (Those from Saint-Malo are unfair traders). They even referred to their own moose as orignac (Basque for "deer"), their shamans as pilotoua (pilots), and their celebratory feasts as tabaquia (shelter, indicating the place where they were held). Although in the 1540s the Indians of the St. Lawrence Gulf palavered with foreign fishermen in "any language," French, English, Gascon, or Basque, by the seventeenth century, a French lawyer said, they traded with the French only in Basque.

Map of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada. Note the "Port aux Basques"