The original San Juan lies buried in silt beneath around 25 feet of water, just off the shore of Red Bay, Labrador. Her discovery — and our current understanding of the whaling industry that thrived in Red Bay 70 years before French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City — were made possible by the work of a British-Canadian archivist, historian and geographer, Selma Huxley Barkham. 

Born in England into a family of intellectual heavy hitters that included Michael Huxley, founder-editor of Geographical magazine, and his cousin, the writer Aldous Huxley, Barkham studied Russian at the Sorbonne in Paris before settling in Canada. In her twenties, she was the librarian at McGill University’s Arctic Institute of North America, where her Russian fluency was strategically useful. There, she met an architecture student, Brian Barkham, who set up a firm in Ottawa. The couple had four children before Brian died of cancer in 1964 in his early 30s.

Barkham was left to support the family on her own. “But,” she would later say, “I also wanted to do something interesting for the children and me.”

Years earlier, while travelling in the Basque Country with Brian, Barkham learned of references to “Terra Nova” in archives related to centuries-old Basque sea voyages. While researching the settlement of Louisbourg, N.S. for Historic Sites Canada, she realized little had been documented about the history of contact in what is now Canada prior to Champlain’s arrival.  

She would work to fill that gap. In 1969, Barkham towed her brood to Guadalajara, Mexico, where she taught English and learned Spanish over the span of three years. She applied for funding from the Canadian government to support research in Basque archives and was denied, but eventually received a private grant of $1,000 from an unknown benefactor. She moved her young family to Spain. 

There, she visited small churches and town halls, where she found rooms filled with loose papers. Much of the archival collection, made up of thousands of handwritten insurance registers and legal records of whaling ships, hadn’t been touched for hundreds of years, and even then, it was primarily used for genealogical work. “There were kilometres of pages,” says her son Michael, who helped her comb through the records throughout his adolescence. 

For years, Barkham travelled from town to town, piecing together a history of the Basque presence in Atlantic Canada dating back to the early 1500s and establishing the location of dozens of whaling stations along the Labrador coast of the Strait of Belle Isle. The strait was a key migration route for right and bowhead whales, and those whales were in demand throughout Europe. Oil from their blubber was used to heat and light homes and to soften jute and hemp for rope-making. Their bones were used in clothing and accessories. The Basques had developed an unparalleled skill in rendering and manufacturing the whales, and by the time the San Juan sailed across the Atlantic for the last time, some 2,000 men were spending their summers working off the coast of Labrador. 

The faithfulness of the reproduction is made possible by detailed plans and reports created by Parks Canada’s archeologists as they excavated the shipwreck. Over the course of thousands of hours underwater, Grenier’s team systematically disassembled San Juan’s wreck, measuring and documenting every component — more than 3,000 individual timbers and several thousand more wood fragments — before carefully replacing it on the seafloor. 

“We were very grateful to Robert Grenier, because he decided to undertake research that nobody had done before,” says Agote. 

“We learned everything from them,” he adds. “We lost completely all the knowledge of how these ships were built 500 years ago… so that was an extraordinary opportunity to understand the science behind transoceanic crossing.”

The Albaola team — which operates with a bare-bones staff and relies on expert craftspeople to volunteer their time — traced scale templates of each of the ship’s component parts onto cardboard laid on the workshop floor. Agote then took those templates into the woods of the Sakana Valley, where, working alongside forest wardens, he measured them against oak tree trunks to determine which trees would provide the best planks, beams, and structural timbers. Following his commitment to complete historical accuracy, trees were harvested following Basque tradition: in winter, during the waning moon, because of how their energy is stored. 

In 2015, UNESCO recognized the rigour of the reconstruction, and provided Albaola’s work patronage. The San Juan is now immortalized within the agency’s logo for underwater archaeology work, which shows the curved hull of the ship amongst the rippling lines of ocean waves.