Well George, now you have an interesting conundrum. There always remains  the 
possibility that the Basque whalers came south into "American" waters in  
search of whales, but no one has dug into the Basque archives to know for sure.  
As well, the early 18th century whalers in New England did not invent their  
trade. British and Dutch whaling companies probably hunted off New England long 
 before the Massachusetts industry, but again the old archives have not been  
exhausted. Suffice to say that American whaling hands from European ships  
settled in New England and generations of their offspring created a culture of  
whaling that has become famous today. But to test for a Basque or Dutch  
connection to those early Americans would be quite a research job. Strangely,  the 
methods and strategies did not differ that much until the development of the  
bomb lance around 1850. Oh, and by the way, bomb lances went out of fashion  
by the end of the 19th century, but a whale dissected off the Pacific Coast by  
fisheries people yielded fragments of a bomb lance in the 1950s and the San  
Diego Natural History Museum folks pondered if this was due to great age  or 
if people were still using that technology in the mid 20th  century?
 
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.