I studied Linguistics at the university of Amsterdam many years ago, and we had to choose a minor subject and I decided to study Basque, and I studied with Rudolf Rijk (here they call him Reijk), and as a subject I though I want to write about these Icelandic Basque glossaries from the early 1600s that had been preserved in Iceland and it appeared that it was a Dutchman in 1937 who wrote his dissertation about that and I was quite excited because in the end of one of these wordlists there were some sentences in pidgin Basque. Apparently Basque was the language used between the Basque fishermen who came to Iceland in the early 1600s and the local Icelanders. And I was very much interested in language contact, I studied "Creole languages" and "Pidgin languages", so this was quite sensational… And what they were talking about in these sentences was also whaling and I associated whaling at that time with Canada, so I thought "Well if they spoke Basque there in Iceland, what happened in Canada?" so I started reading missionary reports and early travel accounts from Canada and to my own great amazement I could read quite a bit of what the native people were saying, of what the First Nations were saying because they used many Basque words. And indeed it appeared that there was also a Basque pidgin in use between the First Nations and the Basques. The Basques were basically the first Europeans to visit the Canadian coast, first as cod fishers and later as whalers, and there they established contacts with the natives, mostly the Innu who speak an Algonquin language, and more to the south also the Mi'kmaq, who also speak an Algonquin language (but they are quite different from each other), and Basque was the language used between these groups.

There is not so much documentation, maybe around 20-25 words from the early 1600 and a few, maybe 5 to 10 sentences from that period, but it's clear that a Basque based pidgin with also Mi'kmaq and Innu words was the language used in that period.