Softly Co?nes the Dawn 131 



on the subject, they seem to have reached America ahead of Cabot 

 and perhaps even Columbus. Whalers thus sailing thousands of miles 

 from their home port simply had to develop some method of ex- 

 tracting the oil from their catches at sea in order to make their voy- 

 ages profitable. The old method of loading up only the blubber 

 and then freighting it back to the home port, there to be "tryed- 

 out," or boiled down, for the extraction of the oil, had become quite 

 uneconomic. 



Francois Sopite's invention came, nevertheless, almost at the end 

 of Basque whaling history, and in large part brought about its final 

 extinction, as we shall see. It was an end product of continuous 

 development by his ancient and extraordinary race which started so 

 long ago that most of the few historians who have written on this 

 subject begin by saying something to the efiFect that "it is not cer- 

 tain whether the Basques actually invented whaling." This we now 

 know to be very far from the truth, for it had been going on in 

 Scandinavia for at least nine thousand years, but it is still quite pos- 

 sible that the Basques had indeed been at the business themselves 

 along their shores for just as long if not longer. Such an extraordi- 

 nary statement calls for considerable clarification. 



Nobody knows who the Basques are or where they came from. 

 It has recently been discovered that they even have a predomi- 

 nantly different blood type from all the rest of humanity; this, in 

 the estimation of some anthropologists, makes them a separate race. 

 Affinities with them, their language, or their culture have been 

 claimed by other peoples all over the earth, from the Caucasus to 

 Ethiopia, and even to North and South America. There are even 

 those who believe they are the remnants of the inhabitants of a 

 series of large islands that once lay out in the Atlantic but sank due 

 to earth movements and gave rise to the story of the lost continent 

 of Atlantis. Current scientific opinion favors the theory that they 

 are the descendants of the Iberians, who appeared with an obvi- 

 ously maritime culture in the peninsula to which they gave their 

 name about ten thousand years ago and then spread far and wide 

 over and around the Mediterranean basin. However, this does not 

 help very much because we don't know where the Iberians came 

 from either, though their culture suggests a slow development, over 

 an immense period of time, from that of still earlier peoples in the 



