There is a woodland near the public pool in the small town of Etxarri-Aranatz in northwestern Navarre, about forty miles from the port of San Sebastián. It is called the forest of Sakana. It has been decades since animals grazed there. As a result, the ground is overgrown with brambles, weeds, and bracken, and thousands of young volunteer trees—hawthorns and the invasive American red oak—compete for light on its slopes. No one notices it. The people are just on their way to the pool.
Out in the scrub, however, are dozens of old oaks. If you look closely, you see that they have grown with a consistent and unusual habit. Perhaps they are a different species? Most have a crown with two prominent leader branches, one going more or less straight up and the other stretching out nearly parallel to the ground. Occasionally, there are also forks with two rising leaders, like the semaphore formation for the letter “U” or two arms raised in triumph. Furthermore, the trees seem to have grown far apart from one another—maybe as much as fifty feet—as though their outstretched arms had been meant to fend off rivals. Some of the trunks are straight up and down, but others have grown in a gentle S curve, responding perhaps to their position on the slopes and among the other old trees.
In the woods of Sakana, an oak pruned in ipinabarro style to yield knees as ship timber.
If they are a new species, they should be christened the ipinabarros, which in Basque means “Let’s leave a few branches on the tree.” That is what these trees were called. They are in fact quite ordinary European oaks, Quercus robur. Their semaphoric shape is the result of pruning, of the response of the oaks to the work of men. “There is no forest in my whole country that is not humanized,” said Álvaro Aragón Ruano, the great student in Spain of the relationship between people and trees. He started listing them: the chopos cabeceros in Aragón, poplars pollarded for straight wood to build houses; the pendolones, evergreen oaks near Salamanca, pruned and shaped like apple trees to give plenty of low branches to cut for charcoal and with twigs and leaves for the pigs and cattle; the beeches whose pollard branches fed the foundry fires in the town of Leitza (see page 142); the oak pollard carrascos in the Sierra de Guadarrama near Madrid; the dehesa oaks of Extremadura, which gave charcoal, cork, and ink; fed the pigs, and sheltered farm fields; pollarded ash for sheep fodder; coppiced chestnut and hazel for barrel hoops. . . . They were the common landscape of the world until the twentieth century. It is simply that almost all of them have been forgotten.
The ipinabarros at Etxarri-Aranatz were just as much a dehesa—a forest farm for feeding livestock—as the oaks of Extremadura, two hundred miles to the southwest. Young trees were severely pruned, either by selecting the needed branches on saplings and suppressing the rest, or by heading back a young tree and selecting the few sprouts that grew back in the desired directions. The small number of major stems were then pollarded every eight to twelve years, leaving one rising stem on each major branch to reach higher into the sky. The small branches went to make charcoal, and the charcoal went to feed the ironworks for which the Basques from early in the Medievum were famous throughout Europe. Good grass grew in the sunny spaces between the widely spaced and much thinned oaks. Every summer, herds of sheep arrived from as far away as La Rioja—more than ninety miles south—to graze on the pasture among the ipinabarros. For thirty days starting on San Miguel’s Day, September 29, the grazing was restricted to pigs who fattened on the falling acorns. All the animals went to market on the Basque coast, from which ships took their fleece or their hams to the rest of coastal Europe.
Some oaks were simply headed back and allowed to sprout many new stems. The ipinabarros—the “leave a few branches” oaks—had another purpose. The boats that brought the products of the country to the rest of the known world were themselves the products of this forest. “Ipinabarros” were what the people who cut the trees called them, but it was illegal to write a contract or a royal decree in Basque. When the princes wanted more boats, their minions commanded the foresters in Castilian: “Dejarán,” they wrote, “horca y pendón.” It was a characteristically graphic expression in Spanish. Horca can mean simply “fork.” The word bandera or punta—“flag” or “tip”—might also be used. Horca meant a large upright, often lightly curved stem. The word pendón meant “pennant,” one of those cloth banners much longer than it was tall, often in the shape of a triangle, which fluttered from a castle’s turret. In this case, it described a large branch trained to grow almost at right angles to the trunk. The general idea, then, was to make by your pruning a few strong vertical branches and a few almost horizontal ones. Perhaps the double meaning of horca—it also meant “gibbet” or “hanging tree”—was not meant to be lost on the royal subjects, who might be tempted to disobey.
The charcoal makers certainly saw no reason to do this elaborate form of pollarding, but the boatbuilders did. In fact, they could not get along without it. To make the frame of a large merchant ship, they needed a great number of stout curved timbers, curbatones. The knees that stabilized the hull structure had to have grown with a deep bend that was almost quadrangular, the pendón. The long curved futtocks, the rib cage to which the planks attached to make the skin of the ship, needed to be upright with a gentle curve, the horca. Sometimes, as in the Y-shaped floor timbers that accommodated the rising of the floor aft in the hull, the ship makers needed a double horca, which indeed resembled the double tines of a pitchfork. For the all-important sternpost, which held the flat stern to the rest of the boat, they had to have a very big pendón, at least 18 inches in diameter, at least 15 feet long on one stem, and maybe 8 feet long on the other.
The Sakana ipinabarros were at once agricultural and industrial. They fed the sheep and the pigs, they provided charcoal, but first and foremost, they created boat wood. Between thirty and ninety years after they had first been pollarded, the oaks were harvested to build the ships. There is even some evidence that in order to get nearly identical pieces for the repetitive use in a hull structure, the bosqueros, or foresters, tied down branches, guiding them to get just the angles they wanted. The inherent architecture of Quercus robur—Rauh’s model among the twenty-four possible forms of trees (see page 43)—also helped the men produce trunk and branch combinations of a stable and dependable shape. The oaks and the men worked together.
All that had been forgotten by the 1960s. The oceangoing, far-trading, whaling, and cod-fishing Basques had turned their backs on the sea. The town built the swimming pool and tolerated the nearby woodland as it filled with thorns. Then, in 1978, marine archaeologist Selma Barkham and her colleagues had found almost intact on the sea bottom a 250-ton whaler, the San Juan. It had been about ninety feet long, capable of carrying a thousand barrels of whale oil or salt cod, and it had gone down in a blow when it dragged anchor in 1565. Dendrochronology showed that its wood had come from the Sakana ipinabarros. It was not found in the harbor at Pasaia, near San Sebastián, where the ship had been built, but about 2473 miles northwest, near Saddle Island in the Strait of Belle Isle, at Red Bay, Newfoundland.
Timber by timber, the Canadians brought each piece of the boat to the surface, studied it, measured it, and sent it back to its cold silt bed. In the process, they also found the remains of three whaleboats—the launches in which the sailors chased the whales—the oldest European clothes and shoes ever discovered in the New World, and whale oil barrels with their hazel hoops. The archaeologists found two more sunken whale ships in the same bay. In so doing, they resurrected a forgotten period of early modern history, and showed how a new kind of ship first came to be built.
More Iberian ships visited Terra Nova for whales and for cod than ever carried gold and other booty from the Indies. For almost all of these ships—whalers, cod ships, Indies traders—the Basques were in charge of both the building and the sailing. (In every port in Europe, you wanted a Basque pilot for your boat.) Some say they had reached the New World before Columbus, and although no documentary evidence has surfaced to substantiate that claim, they were certainly at least on his heels. The Basques were after fish, not gold. Salt cod was a mainstay food all over Europe, and by the sixteenth century most of it came from what would later be called the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The word bacalao, which the whole world uses when it buys dried cod, is simply the way to say cod in Basque. When a ship had made several rounds of the North Atlantic fish trade, it might be retired to the warmer and less rough Indies route.
The greatest shipwrights of the sixteenth century were not the English or the Dutch, not the Portuguese or the French. They were the Basques, who lived and still live in the elbow of Europe, where southern France meets northern Spain. They are a people of unknown origin speaking a language of unknown provenance. It is likely that they are children of the union between indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and incoming Neolithic herders, before ever there was either a France or a Spain. What matters to them is not the nation-state, but the lay of the land, a narrow coastal plain cut with river mouths backed by wooded mountains that in contrast to the rest of Spain are continually green. The whole Basque coast, from Bayonne to Bilbao, is only about eighty miles long, but in the 1500s, it contained at least fifteen shipyards. The builders turned out twenty ships bigger than 100 tons each, per year. It took about four months to complete an average nao, the old Spanish for nave, or ship.
The Basque country has been a contested region as long as there have been records of war. Julius Caesar fixed the boundary between Hispania and Aquitaine that would become the division between Spain and France. (There is a mention of the Romans defeating a force of Saldunas in the Gallic Wars. The word is Basque for “cavalry.”) The Vikings found it a fertile place to raid, especially when the pilgrims’ road to Santiago de Compostela provided a steady stream of victims. The French and Spanish fought over Basque country for thirty years running during the Renaissance. Napoleonic France invaded Spain through it. Defeated Republicans fled into France by way of it at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Through it all, the Basques remained where they were, and they remained emphatically Basque. They built the finest ships of the sixteenth century, helped change the way boats were built, and did so by means of these woodlands of ipinabarros.
The most generous impulse of human beings is the wish to exchange. Its dark side is the lust to have more than your neighbor, and indeed to control what your neighbor can have at all. Out of a tradition of fine carpentry and careful consideration, this people built new kinds of ships to trade with all of Europe and to bring fish and oil from Terra Nova. Not one of these boats was an eagle of the seas, although the king of Spain pressed them into service for his wars. (Many of the ships of the Spanish Armada were built on the Basque coast.) The shipwrights wanted the boats bigger not to hold cannons and soldiers, but to carry more casks of goods. They were among the first to make the difficult transition between the old lapstrake style, where the skin of the ship was first nailed together with overlapping planks, and the carvel style, where a strong broad frame came first.
A Basque carpenter knew what his wood could and could not do. One month, he might make a house, the next a rowboat, the next an altarpiece, the next a whaler. Everybody wanted the ships to carry more cargo and therefore earn more. Even an ordinary seaman did well out of a successful trading voyage: typically one-third of the proceeds were divided among the sailors, and they were likely to be better fed at sea than they would have been on land. The sailors from Spain ate wheat, biscuits, bacon, beans, peas, bacalao, sardines, garlic, olive oil, sherry wine, and cider; the seamen on the French Basque boats ate even better, adding eel, butter, and beef. Basque sailors never got scurvy, because the hard cider they quaffed three times a day was rich in vitamin C.
The wood for the ships often came from municipally owned forests, so when a new ship was made, the nearby town prospered. The price of the wood meant more money for the town fathers to build a bigger church or to improve the always difficult roads. Since a church was not only for worship but for every kind of public meeting, market, and celebration, everyone had an interest in maintaining and expanding it. The carpenter put his mind, heart, and hand to the task.
There is an ancient saying among the seagoing peoples of Europe: “If you want to learn to pray, go to sea,” to which some added “If you want to learn to sleep, go to church.” One can imagine that a carpenter dreaming through Mass one Sunday at his parish church might have conceived the analogy between the structure of his boat-to-be—a nave or nao—and the nave of the church in which he pretended to be wide awake. He had built both kinds of naves, the one that floated and the one that stood. There had always been a loose analogy between church and ship, since Christian iconography envisioned the church as a ship in which all of the people rode to heaven. What if he looked more closely into the analogy and made it into structure?
The owner was bothering him to fit more cargo in the new nao. What, he must have thought, if I treated my ship nave like a church nave? What if I built a sturdy frame, buttressed against all kinds of twisting? What if I clad the three- or even four-storied frame with planks, just as I clad the church with stone? What if I used for the building of the ship a system of proportional measures like those I use for laying out nave, chancel, and sanctuary?
Suddenly, he really was awake. He sat up so straight so fast that people around him coughed and looked studiedly away. “As, dos, tres,” he mumbled, hoping it would pass for a prayer. “As, dos, tres.”
“One, two, three.”
Let my house—I mean, my ship—be one unit across the beam at its widest point, he thought. Let its keel be twice that unit. Let its whole length from stem to stern be three times that unit. Now, I must sit in the sea, not on the land. I need to be rounded and stable in the waves. I need to have a strong neck like a cod. And like that bacalao, I need arcs from top to bottom and from front to back, so I can breast the waves without breaking. If I do these things, I can make a deep hold with three stories, like a house, and the crossbeams of the hold itself will help stabilize the shape.
Mass had become very interesting indeed.
After church, he was late for lunch. He was out in the yard, sketching in the dirt with a shepherd’s staff.
So, he said to himself, I know the widest breadth amidships and the depth of the hold I want if I am to carry all those barrels of goods. From these dimensions, I create a master frame, the centerpiece of my strong bacalao skeleton. By making a series of arcs and lines—the widest arc, the arc of the bottom, the arc of the sides, the line of the floor, and the line of the top deck—I can create a mold with which to mark the central master frame. Then, by shifting the mold to accommodate the narrowing and rising of the fish body, I can make a series of arcs and lines that will mark for me the dimensions of at least the most important frames fore and aft of the master frame.
He was dizzy, and had not yet had his cider. They were calling him from the dining table.
The boat would be based on frames, not planks. It could have internal floors and ceilings, so that there were three separate decks to hold cargo. The central dozen or so frames would be worked out directly with the mold, and they would be joined one to another with mortise and tenon to lend greater stability in the middle of the ship, where the mast was tacked and where the greatest forces would come. (When heeled over for cleaning or repairs in the drydock too, it was this section that bore the brunt of the ship’s mass. Behind and ahead of these crucial frames—the maderas de cuenta, or calculated wood—each frame would have to projected using the mold, the maderas de cuenta, and the builder’s eye. But it could be done, it could be done.
Now, he could go in, eat his dinner, and raise a toast to a ship shaped like a cod that could carry a thousand barrels or more. It was all thanks to his wandering mind at church. Perhaps without knowing, he had indeed been learning to pray.
To make this imagined ship, he needed a tremendous quantity of wood, and the crucial part of it needed to be large and curved, to make the bacalao’s spine and ribs. When finished, the ships would be rated at 200 to 500 tons. (Tonnage is a measure of how much cargo volume the hold can bear.) Each hundred required at least 4300 cubits of wood, or about 6000 linear feet. Fortunately, his cousin was a bosquero. Together, they examined the municipal forest at Sakana. There were already a decent number of oaks with forks that could make good ribs, futtocks, floor timbers, stem- and sternposts. If the idea caught on, however, they would be making many more than one of these ships. They would need to design the ships to fit the wood and the wood to fit the boats.
To build the bacalao-shaped ship, the local people needed to organize. An owner hired a carpenter. The builder went to the bosquero. The forester found some of the wood already grown, but he also began a steady program to make new wood. He started new oaks from acorns, trained them in the nursery planted them out, trained the young as ipinabarros, took a few harvests of charcoal from them, and after thirty or forty years, he could cut them for a new boat. He also found young and resprouted oaks, cutting them to horca y pendón, and so shortcutting the time to harvest. The building and the woodsmanship both called for skill, practical intelligence and consistent planning, as well as the training of apprentices to continue the work. (It necessarily took more than one generation.)
To fund the work, an owner joined with outfitters, who would take his finished boat abroad to make money with it. They both borrowed from lenders at what may now seem exorbitant rates of up to 30 percent. “Prêt a grosse aventure,” it was called in the French Basque lands: “loan for a big gamble.” As a backup, some of the world’s first insurers underwrote the cost in the event of disaster, taking a 15 percent stake. The same carpenters built seamen’s chapels on high points overlooking the Bay of Biscay, so the wives could pray for their husbands and sons, looking out over the seas that had taken them, and the husbands and sons could direct their prayers and hearts toward those same high chapels. As they left port, the chapel was often the last thing that the sailors could make out on land, and the first thing they could see on their return.
The change in the boats was both revolutionary and traditional. It was accomplished by carpenters, each of whom had learned from his father or teacher—usually one and the same—the way to turn wood into structure. Nothing had changed, except the context. By dreaming with a wider eye, they had transformed the way men went to sea. Still, the process was idiosyncratic, always incorporating the apprentice’s learning.
It became customary to make the new boats entirely of oak, but the San Juan, like many older boats, had a beech keel. She was nothing special as a new-style boat, just one of the hundreds of naos built in the sixteenth century in the Basque country. At three decks and 250 tons, she was small to average in size. Beech had the advantage in Basque country of being easily available and when it was in forest situations of growing straight. It took a straight, unpollarded trunk to make the keel. Beech was also an excellent wood to carve. And carve the builder did.
Viking boatmakers had been called stemsmiths, because the carving of their keel and prow was the central fact from which the rest of the boat emerged. Half a millennium later, the builder of the San Juan still acted like a stemsmith. The keel was almost fifty feet long, cut from an eight-ton trunk. In the center, it was shaped like a capital T, but as it stretched forward and aft, the builder had carved the garboards—the first exterior planks—right into the keel. For those runs, the keel has a cross section like a capital Y. The first “planks” there were in fact built into the keel. On the forward edge, he carved the keel to angle it up toward the stem. In short, the carpenter envisioned the whole boat and constrained its construction in the shape he gave to its first and fundamental piece.
A contract for a cod-shaped nao ran no more than three hundred words. They had to be in Spanish, but as it happens the writer occasionally needed to borrow a Basque word, for want of the equivalent in Spanish. Thus, in order to say that the carpenter was responsible to make the entire ship, the contract specified, “You will complete the ship from the keel to the albaola.” The latter was the very top edge ceiling piece all around the boat. It sealed the joints between futtocks, hull, and ceiling, so the water ran off and not into the holds or the frame. It was elaborately crenellated, like the battlement of a castle, the top of each third futtock slotting neatly into the pattern. It, too, was a masterpiece of carving.
Between the two named pieces, the whole of the new ship had to rise. The frame pieces—the three layers of futtock that made the cod skeleton, the knees that stabilized it, the floor pieces that made a firm bottom, the enormous stem and stern pieces—all had to be found among the ipinabarros, felled, hewed in the woods to their rough final shape, ox-drawn to the river sides, and floated down to the building site where the river ran into the sea. There were ninety-six each of first, second, and third futtock arcs, and more than sixty knees. From the same woods or from another nearby where the oaks had grown in tight groups to make them straight trunked and little branched, the fellers took whole oaks to the base, then pit-sawed them tangentially for the planks, stacked them, loaded them, floated them down the river, and took them to the boatyard at Rentería, where the work was about to get under way. Some of the planks were thirty feet long or more.
All the wood was cut and used green, which made it easier to shape at the site but liable to twist as it dried. The work began in late winter, partly because it was easier to see the needed shapes and lengths when the leaves were down, but also because the trees were dormant and the low temperatures kept them from drying and shifting quickly. Still, there was pressure to get the work done quickly. Fifteen or twenty fellers and sawyers worked together in tight woods; maybe thirty or more fellers and hewers among the more widely spaced ipinabarros.
Only when both kinds of wood were on site could the work begin. The keel, keelson, and stem and stern pieces set the dimensions of the frame. The three levels of futtocks—placed one atop the other—made the skeleton. The knees stabilized it fore and aft and side to side. The planks—not lapped as in the medieval boats but butt-jointed one against the next up and down and side to side—formed the skin on the outside and the supports for the decks on the inside.
Although the nao depended for its capacity and stability on its strong skeleton, the frame was not completed before the planks were applied. Rather, the building went on stepwise, in rhythm. Teams of framers and clavadores, or nailers, followed each other through the boat.
Indeed, sometimes one team would go down the beach to work on another nao and return later to continue on the first when the other team had knocked out its part. The framers began by placing the floor timbers and the maderas de cuenta, from which the rest of the hull would be projected. Then they started by placing the first futtocks in a section of the ship. The nailers followed, using iron nails to set the long thick planks in place, and setting sleeper planks on the inner face, both to hold in place the first futtock tops and to create a support for the decks to come. On the first pass, they used only iron nails. Later, they would return to place oak treenails. The latter expanded into the holes and stabilized the all-important connection between planks and frames.
On these boats, the planks really were part of the frame. It was they that gave the fore and aft stability to the rising ribs. Indeed, the three levels of futtocks that stretch from the floor timbers to the albaola were not joined butt to butt. Instead, they overlapped one another at each level. They were called floating futtocks. Only the inboard sleeper and the outboard plank held them in position with respect to one another. The effect when you see the frame in process is of a thousand intricately woven tuning forks held together by horizontal lines of tongue depressors. This made the initial structure a little tenuous, but when the planking was done, it was a stable and a flexible frame.
One thing the makers took pride in was their adze work. If you have ever held or used an adze, you know it is a heavy and somewhat awkward tool. The blade is set at a right angle to the handle. You stand on the wood and cut between your feet. A saw opens the grain, tearing the fibers; an adze can close the grain, making the wood repel oils and stains and resist the invasion of marine worms. A good adzeman left a mirror finish on the surface he cut, as smooth as could be accomplished with a plane. All the futtocks, knees, and planks were adzed smooth on each of their exposed faces. Heavy though the tool was, it left a delicate edge, like a face that has just been shaved.
Almost half a millennium later, in Pasaia, the same port where the ship was built and using wood from the forest at Sakana, the same woodland that gave it its ipinabarros, a small group of historical-boat builders are making the San Juan again. They call their project Albaola, for that finely carved sill that was part of the old contracts, and also “Itsas Kultura Faktoria,” a sea culture factory. They started in 2013 and were supposed to be done in 2016, to celebrate the European Union’s declaration of San Sebastián as that year’s “capital of culture.” Easier said than done.
Making a boat that was part of an intricate culture, handed down from generation to generation, is not as simple as pushing Save on the keyboard. Ni mucho menos. The first issue was the wood. There are those ninety-six curved first futtocks, each with a radius of about twenty-one feet. The builders went out to Sakana and to other pollard woods nearby. Although hundreds of years had passed, the shapes were still visible. It looked as if it would not be easy to find the pieces, but not too difficult either. Sure, they would be a little larger than they might have been in 1564, but that would simply mean a lot more sawing and adzing. The trouble was first one, then another, then a third, was rotten at the core.
Even where the wood was intact, it had often long since grown and lost branches, leaving knots that weakened the stem, or developed shakes, cracks that reduced its stability. “If the carpenter of the San Juan looked at what we are using,” said Mikel Leoz, one of Albaola’s leaders, “he would be horrified. ‘This is shit!’ he would say. ‘Get rid of that one. And that one! And that one!’ He could pick and choose. He had good wood. Ours is second or third quality.” The pollard forests are almost gone now. Using the last remnants is like trying to make a lamb stew out of week-old roadkill.
It took the original builders only four months to make the first San Juan. The Albaola project had three years. Surprisingly, the greater time frame made the work harder, not easier. A large number of people working quickly to achieve the end certainly must have given the project a spirit of camaraderie, but that was not the reason for the speed. Green wood moves as it dries. The Albaola carpenters found out to their cost that if they set up a section of futtocks and left it alone for a month or two, when they came back, they would find that their straight line of square timber tops was no longer straight, no longer equal in height, and each piece was no longer square but a nest of drunken rhomboids.
How had the original builders avoided this warping? By working fast. The nailers came right after the framers in a come-and-go rhythm, not just to get the work done and the boat in the water but to keep the wood in line. When you nail a plank and a sleeper to the top of a course of futtocks, it can’t go anywhere, not up or down or out of square. The intelligence of the making was not only in the design and the materials, but also in the teamwork and the timing. From start to finish, each person had a job that mattered.
Itsas kultura. Sea culture. The builders at Albaola may not have finished on time, but they have begun the work of remembering. It is a hopeful sign. They have shown that not in the ancient past but teetering on the edge of the modern world, it was still possible for people to give and take with the woods around them, without degrading either. It was not just raw materials and labor that built the San Juan. It was a way of life that embraced woodlands, river, ports, carpenters, the open sea, the whales, the cod, and Labrador.
Soon enough, the Spanish king would demand the ships for war. Soon enough, the Little Ice Age would bring early ice to Red Bay, trap ships for the winter, and change the migration patterns of the right whales and the bowheads. Soon enough, the Dutch would figure out a way to make ships cheap and dirty and sail them using convicts, ending Basque preeminence in trade. Aragón Ruano thinks that the surviving ipinabarros should be preserved and treated with reverence as though they were cathedrals or castles. It is a good idea.