latter part of the season after having finished whaling off the eastern coast of Greenland. The last time whalers were mentioned ashore was in 1712, when Spanish Basque ships attempted to trade in Grundarfjörður but were stopped by a lawman. Foreign whalers are only mentioned sporadically in the annals for the rest of the century. During century and a half of Basque whaling, a basic language (a pidgin) known to have been in use in Iceland was developed in order to allow for communication between the Basque whalers and other traders from different nations of the north Atlantic. Spitsbergen and Northern Norway Spitsbergen and expulsion It was in the northeastern North Atlantic that the Basques witnessed the loss of their near monopoly on the trade beginning in the early 17th century. Their men were recruited for English (1611), Dutch (1613), northern French (1613), and Danish (1617) whaling expeditions to Spitsbergen, where they hunted the bowhead whale. The first was caught on 12 June 1611 (Old-Style) by one of the six Basque whalemen recruited from the town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. When the merchants of San Sebastian learned of this new whaling ground they were eager to expand their operations to that distant corner of the Arctic. The next year, 1612, they dispatched a single ship under the command of Juan de Erauso and piloted by the Englishman Nicholas Woodcock, a former employee of the Muscovy Company of London who had made two prior voyages to Spitsbergen (1610–11). Upon reaching Spitsbergen they discovered such an abundance of whales "that for a stretch of sixty leagues along the coast the sea was obscured." The Englishman Thomas Edge, master of the Sea Horse (180 tons), one of the two ships sent by the Muscovy Company to Spitsbergen, spoke with Woodcock while surveying the coast in a pinnace, reporting that the Basque ship had "made a full Voyage in Green-harbour", or Grønfjorden, on the south side of Isfjorden. On his return Woodcock spent sixteen months imprisoned in the Gatehouse and Tower for leading foreign vessels into an "English preserve". The expedition returned to Spain "with [such] glowing reports of the wealth of the fishery" that a patent was secured from the Viceroy of Navarre, Don Alonso de Idiáquez, conde de Aramayona. Its report led others to send out a fleet of whaleships to Spitsbergen in 1613, including the ports of Holland, northern France, and the Basque