In the 1930s to 1950, ships were content with a couple of weeks of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. Leaving Europe or the seaports of Africa, the boats moved to America through the great waters, carrying a large number of people and carrying their usual burden. But the Grand Duke did not dare to draw his attention. The World War also burned the sea since 1939. Both Germans and Britons wanted to control all the seas, using submarines and warcraft. Many of them had been caught up in this struggle and had tried to leave the crucible of war, that of Europe. This happened to more than a hundred Basques who embarked on Marseilles in December 1940, when they went to America to test freedom on the Alsina Boat. They did not know then that the supposed 15-day crossing was going to be almost fifteen months. Nor would their fate be in the hands of not only the Nazis and the Francoists, but also in the strategic movements of Britain.

Incidents in Marseille

The exiles throughout France learned that, thanks to the efforts of Mexican diplomats, several boats moved to America, albeit drops, from Marseilles, the “free region”. At the end of December 1940, the Transatlantic Company was about to leave the port of Alsina in Française. As a result, from Pau, Montauban, Bordeaux and Paris, passing the famous “demarcation line”, more than a hundred Basque refugees arrived in Marseille with the intention of fleeing on the boat. With the subsidy from the JARE (Spanish Republican Aid Commission), after obtaining a card that cost about 3,500 pounds, they began to board on 14 January. But it was not easy, as the Spanish Embassy and Police followed these movements closely. Worse still: Both the French authorities and the Gestapo were given lists of names to prevent some politicians who might be passengers from escaping. These censuses included Federica Montseny, Paulino Gómez Saiz, Antonio Sbert, Juan Peiro and others. It wasn't a joke. As for the Basques, former Deputy Rafael Picabea, founder of El Pueblo Vasco, after boarding the boat, was evicted by the Franco authorities and by the Vichy Government. Nestor Basterretxea fully agrees on this matter: "Picabea passed police control, using her son's passport, because they had the same name as her son's. But when she got up, she started calling her, and the police suspected something, and they left for her. They went back down to the pier and had to keep several days of arrest in order to lose the boat enough and remain under the threat of extradition. Both the son and the father ultimately had to stay in France.”

However, there were others that were more favoured: When he finally departed from Marseilles, Alsina transported about 700 passengers, counting on his crew. Over half of them were citizens of Belgium, Austria and France. They were a little less refugees fleeing the city since the end of the Spanish civil war. Among them, Niceto Alfighter Zamora, II Championship of Spain. The first president of the Republic and his four sons; the former Navarro Deputy Constantino Salinas and his two daughters; the Basque Government counsellor Telesforo Monzón; the well-known journalist of ANV José Olivares Tellagorri; Vicente Amezaga and Mercedes Iribarren; the former Deputy Francisco Basterretxea and his whole family…

In view of what the Spanish police had done in France, travellers were completely suspicious of the boat being approached by the Spanish Army as it passed through the Mediterranean. Fortunately this did not happen and after leaving the Oran and the Strait of Gibraltar, they were able to see in front of the large Atlantic. As they moved away from Europe, freedom seemed increasingly affordable.

What Dakar brought

Traveling along the African coast, they arrived in Dakar twelve days later. In this African city, as usual, they needed a couple of days to feed and refuel, before diverting to the other side of the Atlantic. But here began the surprise, for the interim stop was eternal. The British Army did not authorize Alsina’s diving into the Atlantic, “Navy Act”, because it lacked the navigation permit needed to navigate international waters.

It was a boat that travelled from France and with a French flag, so it was approved by the German Government of Vichy, which was suspicious to the British. In the conflict in the seas, even commercial boats seemed like peones from a chess game. In fact, the German submarines had no hesitation in sinking them, and the British were willing to get rid of any boat that could be in favour of Hitler, either from the army or from private companies. A few months earlier, on 3 July 1940, the destruction of the French Army by Royal Navy at Mers the Kébi of Algeria clearly demonstrated that the British fleet was prepared to attack to the extreme and destroy anyone who was not a friend.
Basterretxea is clear on the thread of this task: “When we arrived in Dakar, there was a big shattering. Silence as well. The sailors were still taking out the things that were damaged in the last bombing by the British. The British thought, and were fair, that the brilliant French army would eventually come into the hands of the Germans, because Pétain [Philippe Pétain, French Marshal and Vichy Head of Government] was getting smaller and smaller.” Hitler, for his part, dominated the vast European and Atlantic region controlled by Finland from the north to Hendaia.

In the port of Dakar, therefore, Alsina was unable to leave. Next to him was one of the strongest boats the French army had in the past: The destroyer Richelieu. France was the only symbol of the Vichy, the grand or the sterile ambition. But the warship was completely immobile, because it had the cannons and motorcycles crumbling. At sea, as on land, the British and the Germans dominated. Thus, the stop that Alsina was going to do began to extend, and through the wires began to spread to the United States, London, Mexico and Buenos Aires, blocked by the forces of Dakar. It was impossible to achieve the joyous “Navy Act” and there they were anchored.

Although from time to time they went down to the city of Dakar, the travelers lived on the boat. Together with a Russian ballet company, the Basques, under the direction of Jesus Luisa Esnaola, quickly formed their own dance group. Basterretxea agrees well: “One day, as I made a drawing on Alsina’s back, Jesus Luisa approached me and told me if I would make some drawings of Xuberoa’s dances. I wanted them as a scenography or as a poster. I said yes, and then I started to learn those dances with the other young people. I was making zamaltzaina and, by the way, drawing upon them. Everything was a bit surreal. A Russian ballet company was with us. They were good dancers and the performances were done on the same boat, in front of everyone. Normal relationships were also established between boys and girls. There, several couples and a wedding had been made and dissolved. Overcome the obstacles to the bird – the women walked in the back and the men in the basements of the bow – even a boy or girl was put on the road of his arrival in the world…”. From

Casablanca to Buenos Aires by the desert

So they stayed for five months at the docks in Dakar, at the request of the boat owners, until Alsina had to go back to Marseille. The passengers had no intention of returning to French chaos, and when the boat landed in Casablanca on 3 June, most of them preferred to land there. The balance was nothing good: they regressed in time and at sea, redepended on Vichy, and the threat of repatriation was much greater than when they left Marseilles.

This did not happen, however, as the French authorities sent the refugees to Kashba Tadla and Sidi el Ayachi, in Central Africa. In the first there were the groups of barracks that were once used by the French soldiers, in the middle of the desert, converted into a “field refuge” for those of Alsina. Sidi el Ayachi, something like that. Here are the words of Basterretxea: “They placed us four kilometers from the town, in an old house that was in the hands of the Germans. This is a limp! The camels were full of soot. We had to wash everything, because we had to sleep on the ground. And I remember when the night came, a former congressional chemo touched the violin, how bad, people started crying.” Most refugees had to enjoy these miserable barracks for four months, but the heat and illnesses they had suffered in Dakar made their stay in the desert smoother.

The solution hardly came from Mexico. Taking advantage of the money from exile and through Indalecio Prieto, JARE sent another boat, Quanza, with the aim of rescuing the refugees. The boat, which was flying the Portuguese flag in a neutral country, got the travel tickets in New York, Mexico and Lisbon, after an intense negotiation process. He was sent to Casablanca to host some 400 refugees. The goal was in Veracruz (Mexico), but Quanza also intended to make a stop in Havana. From these ports, passengers were forced to continue their journey with other boats. So, at the end of October 1941, the Portuguese boat headed to America with the aforementioned friends. In Veracruz, Mexicans received the newcomers with hospitality. They spent two days there and had the opportunity to walk around Mexico City. In Havana, on the contrary, they underwent new measures of internment by the government of Batista. They were not detained, but in case they had been kept in isolation for several days. That's what quarantine artist says: “Hoping to return to Havana, a new dip. Foreigners had to go through the place of entry called Tiscornia. We were there, with the excuse of disinfection, I don’t know, 20, 40 days… There they carried the ‘foreigners with a pulse’ like us and everything that was suspected. One day, for example, there were twelve men who had escaped from the prisons of French Guiana. To draw what beautiful colors and what beautiful heads. I started… but with someone’s eyes I realized it was better not to follow.”

Meanwhile, those who managed to avoid Havana and continue with the journey gradually approached the definitive destinations: Montevideo and Buenos Aires. For example, Alcalá Zamora arrived in Argentina on the Swedish cargo ship Herma Gorthon on 28 January 1942. Later came the Basterretxea, Jose Luis Ituarte Etxekalte, Patxo Agirre, Tellagorri, etc. These, after suffering the Cuban quarantine, went to Buenos Aires on the boat of Río de la Plata and although they were in South American waters, they still suffered some scare. Nestor Basterretxea remembers her last meeting with a German submarine: “The noise of the engines stopped suddenly. The boat muted, and in that strange silence, we, who had just climbed out of the basement. There was an extraordinarily beautiful moon and, like a great shadow, a long, black lot emerged from the sea. He was a German submarine. They began to threaten us and ask us hard questions: to see which people were going, where we were going... Our captain rushed and told them to ask in Berlin, that we were Americans, Argentinians, passages… of everything, but that we had nothing to do with war. At last, the submarine re-entered the sea and departed. After a while, the nerves kept dancing, as the gunshot capacity of the torpedoes was enormous. But we were lucky, we endured and… even Buenos Aires!”

By the time this happened, they had been dreaming about reaching America for over 500 days. After the end of the fateful crossing of the Atlantic, and shocked by the warm welcome of the Argentine Basque community, they did not even notice that they had just begun a longer new journey: that of exile.