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This is a great question and a great excuse to blow off work and search the net for an answer. There's plenty to be said out there about the Wampaunoag's making their own hooks and line and spears and traps and the various methods of catching eels which they appear to have enjoyed as a regular part of their diet, but nothing on if they used them for bait. Then again, with tribes that were spread out from Maine to Rhode Island and Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket and spending their summers near the shore expressly for the fishing, I would have to imagine, as someone else surmised, except that maybe it was William Wampanaog instead of Alphonso Penn who said to himself, "Self, that last fish was fat with eels, now suppose I hook one of those small eels through the snout that I trapped, on this hook that I made and toss it out into the waves off Corn Hill. Don't you think that big fish would go after the eel first before it would go after the empty hook? Hey self, when I'm right, I'm right"
My money is with the Native Americans as the "eel as bait discoverers".
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