Madoc

For other uses, see Madoc (disambiguation).

Madoc or Madog ab Owain Gwynedd was, according to folklore, a Welsh prince who sailed to America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492. According to the story, he was a son of Owain Gwynedd, who took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The "Madoc story" legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about a Welsh hero's sea voyage, only allusions to which survive. However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when English and Welsh writers wrote of the claim that Madoc had come to the Americas as an assertion of prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England.

The "Madoc story" remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Madoc's voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendants still live somewhere in America. These "Welsh Indians" were accredited with the construction of a number of natural and man-made landmarks throughout the American Midwest, and a number of white travellers were inspired to go and look for them. The "Madoc story" has been the subject of much speculation in the context of possible pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. No historical or archaeological proof of such a man or his voyages has been found in the New or Old World; however speculation abounds connecting him with certain sites, such as Devil's Backbone, located on the Ohio River at Fourteen Mile Creek near Louisville, Kentucky.

Background

c 1577 map depicting Conwy, Penrhyn, and Llandudno (Rhos-on-Sea)

Madoc's purported father, Owain Gwynedd, was a real prince of Gwynedd during the 12th century and is widely considered one of the greatest Welsh rulers of the Middle Ages. His reign was fraught with battles with other Welsh princes and with Henry II of England. At his death in 1170, a bloody dispute broke out between his heir Hywel the Poet-Prince and Owain's younger sons Maelgwn, Rhodri, and led by Dafydd, all three the sons of the Princess-Dowager Cristen. Owain had at least 13 children from his two wives and several more children born out of wedlock but legally acknowledged under Welsh tradition. According to the legend, Madoc and his brother Rhirid were among them, though no contemporary record attests to this.

The 1584 Historie of Cambria by Caradoc of Lancarvan claims the story that Madoc was disheartened by this family fighting, and he and Rhirid set sail from Llandrillo (Rhos-on-Sea) in the cantref of Rhos to explore the western ocean with a couple of ships. They discovered a distant and abundant land in 1170 where about one hundred men, women and children disembarked to form a colony. Madoc and some others returned to Wales to recruit additional settlers. After gathering several ships of men, women and children the Prince and his recruiters sailed west a second time to that Westerne countrie and ported in "Mexico", never to return to Wales again.

Madoc's landing place has also been suggested to be west Florida or Mobile Bay, Alabama, in the United States. Although the folklore tradition acknowledges that no witness ever returned from the second colonial expedition to report this, the story continues that Madoc's colonists traveled up the vast river systems of North America, raising structures and encountering friendly and unfriendly tribes of Native Americans before finally settling down somewhere in the Midwest or the Great Plains.

Welsh Indians

George Catlin thought the Mandan bull boat to be similar to the Welsh coracle

On November 26, 1608, Peter Wynne, a member of Captain Christopher Newport's exploration party to the villages of the Eastern Siouan Monacan above the falls of the James River in Virginia, wrote a letter to John Egerton, informing him that some members of Newport's party believed the pronunciation of the Monacans' language resembled "Welch", which Wynne spoke, and asked Wynne to act as interpreter. The Monacan were among those non-Algonquian tribes collectively referred to by the Algonquians as "Mandoag".

Another early settler to claim an encounter with a Welsh-speaking Indian was the Reverend Morgan Jones, who told Thomas Lloyd, William Penn's deputy, that he had been captured in 1669 by a tribe of Tuscarora called the Doeg. According to Jones, the chief spared his life when he heard Jones speak Welsh, a tongue he understood. Jones' report says that he then lived with the Doeg for several months preaching the Gospel in Welsh and then returned to the British Colonies where he recorded his adventure in 1686. Historian Gwyn Williams comments "This is a complete farrago and may have been intended as a hoax".

Madoc's proponents believe earthen fort mounds at Devil's Backbone along the Ohio River to be the work of Welsh colonists

Folk tradition has long claimed that a site called "Devil's Backbone" at Rose Island, about fourteen miles upstream from Louisville, Kentucky, was once home to a colony of Welsh-speaking Indians. Eighteenth-century Missouri River explorer John Evans of Waunfawr in Wales took up his journey in part to find the Welsh-descended "Padoucas" or "Madogwys" tribes.

There have been suggestions that the wall of Fort Mountain in Georgia owes its construction to a race of what the Cherokee termed "moon-eyed people" because they could see better at night than by day. (A competing tradition claims that the wall was built by Hernando de Soto to defend against the Creek Indians around 1540.) Archaeologists believe the stones were placed there by Native Americans. These "moon-eyed people," who were said to have fair skin, blonde hair and opalescent eyes, have often been associated with Prince Madoc and his Welsh band. There is also a theory that the "Welsh Caves" in Desoto State Park, northeastern Alabama, were built by Madoc's party, since local native tribes were not known to have ever practiced such stonework or excavation as was found on the site.

In 1810, John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had in 1782 with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River. The chief allegedly told him that the forts were built by a white people called "Welsh", as protection against the ancestors of the Cherokee, who eventually drove them from the region. Sevier had also written in 1799 of the alleged discovery of six skeletons in brass armor bearing the Welsh coat-of-arms. He claims that Madoc and the Welsh were first in Alabama.

In 1824, Thomas S. Hinde wrote a letter to John S. Williams, editor of The American Pioneer regarding the Madoc Tradition. In the letter, Hinde claimed to have gathered testimony from numerous sources that stated Welsh people under Owen Ap Zuinch had come to America in the twelfth century, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Hinde claimed that in 1799, six soldiers had been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana on the Ohio River with breastplates that contained Welsh coat-of-arms.

Encounters with Welsh Indians

Thomas Jefferson was aware of the Welsh speaking Indian tribes. In a letter written to Meriwether Lewis by Jefferson on January 22nd, 1804, he speaks of searching for the Welsh Indians said to be up the Missouri. Historian Stephen E. Ambrose writes in his history book Undaunted Courage that Thomas Jefferson believed the "Madoc story" to be true and instructed Lewis and Clark to find the descendants of the Madoc Welsh Indians. In the history encyclopedia Britain And The Americas: Culture, Politics, And History: A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia it tells of the specific instructions from Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark to search for the Welsh Indians on their way to the Pacific Ocean.

Francis Lewis (Welshman), a signer of the American Declaration of Independence was captured by Louis-Joseph de Montcalm during the French and Indian War. During captivity he had a conversation with an Indian chief who spoke Welsh, which apparently saved his life.

The frontiersman James Girty, while acting as a "runner" between the British and Indians, talked much about his encounters with Welsh Indians. He thought there was a connection between them and the Mandan people. Girty had even made up a list of over 300 Welsh Indian words and phrases that he had learned from the Welsh Indians.

Mandans

In all, at least thirteen real tribes, five unidentified tribes, and three unnamed tribes have been identified as "Welsh Indians." Eventually, the legend settled on identifying the Welsh Indians with the Mandan people, who were said to differ from their neighbors in culture, language, and appearance. The painter George Catlin suggested the Mandans were descendants of Madoc and his fellow voyagers in North American Indians (1841); he found the round Mandan Bull Boat similar to the Welsh coracle, and he thought the advanced architecture of Mandan villages must have been learned from Europeans (advanced North American societies such as the Mississippian and Hopewell cultures were not well known in Catlin's time). Supporters of this claim have drawn links between Madoc and the Mandan mythological figure "Lone Man", who, according to one tale, protected some villagers from a flooding river with a wooden corral.

Sources of the legend

The Madoc story evidently originated in medieval romance. There are allusions to what may have been a sea voyage tale akin to The Voyage of Saint Brendan, but no detailed version of it survives. The earliest certain reference appears in a cywydd by the Welsh poet Maredudd ap Rhys (fl. 1450-83) of Powys, which mentions a Madog who is a son or descendant of Owain Gwynedd and who voyaged to the sea. The poem is addressed to a local squire, thanking him for a fishing net on a patron's behalf. Madog is referred to as "Splendid Madog... / Of Owain Gwynedd's line, / He desired not land... / Or worldy wealth but the sea."

There are also claims that the Welsh poet and genealogist Gutun Owain wrote about Madoc before 1492. Gwyn Williams in Madoc, the Making of a Myth, makes it clear that Madoc is not mentioned in any of Owain's surviving manuscripts. According to historian J.V. Brower in his work Mandan there was an unauthenticated Welsh legend known in the twelfth century indicating a Norse discovery of Iceland and Greenland. Because of bitter conflict, apparently over the "Prince of Wales" Owain Gwynedd's inheritance, Madoc (one of Owain's sons) as a seaman decided to pursue these stories of far off lands to the west to get away from all the bickering and fighting. Madoc, being a ship builder, built a ship in 1169-70 for his big voyage west. He christen her "Gwennan Gorn". His brother Rhiryd already had a ship, which was called "Pedr Sant". The two then left from the coast of North Wales and set sail in 1170 A.D. with over one hundred men. After much traveling on the Western Ocean they eventually came to a fertile land. There Madoc left most of his people and returned to Wales with a few people as recruiters to collect another larger group of people to colonize this New World. In Wales he obtained ten ships full of men and women and returned a year or so later to the coast of North America for the second time, never to return to Wales.

The Madoc legend attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when Welsh and English writers used it to bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain. The earliest surviving full account of Madoc's voyage, as the first to make the claim that Madoc had come to America, appears in Humphrey Llwyd's 1559 Cronica Walliae, an English adaptation of the Brut y Tywysogion. The story soon became hugely popular. A Title Royal was submitted to Queen Elizabeth in 1580 which stated that "The Lord Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynned, Prince of Gwynedd, led a Colonie and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabouts" in 1170. An account of Madoc's story appears in George Peckham's A True Report of the late Discoveries of the Newfound Landes (1583). It was picked up in David Powel's Historie of Cambria (1584) and Richard Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). John Dee went so far as to assert that Brutus of Britain and King Arthur as well as Madoc had conquered lands in the Americas and therefore their heir Elizabeth I of England had a priority claim there.

The Welsh Indians were not claimed until over a century later. Morgan Jones' tract is the first account, and was printed by The Gentleman's Magazine, launching a slew of publications on the subject. There is no genetic or archaeological evidence that the Mandan are related to the Welsh, however, and John Evans and Lewis and Clark reported they had found no Welsh Indians. The Mandan are still alive today; the tribe was decimated by a smallpox epidemic in 1837-1838 and banded with the nearby Hidatsa and Arikara into the Three Affiliated Tribes.

The Welsh Indian legend was revived in the 1840s and 1850s; this time the Zunis, Hopis, and Navajo were claimed to be of Welsh descent, by George Ruxton (Hopis, 1846), P. G. S. Ten Broeck (Zunis, 1854), and Abbé Emmanuel Domenach (Zunis, 1860), among others. Brigham Young became interested in the supposed Hopi-Welsh connection: in 1858 Young sent a Welshman with Jacob Hamblin to the Hopi mesas to check for Welsh-speakers there. None were found, but in 1863 Hamblin brought three Hopi men to Salt Lake City, where they were "besieged by Welshmen wanting them to utter Celtic words," to no avail. Llewellyn Harris, a Welsh-American Mormon missionary who visited the Zuni in 1878, wrote that they had many Welsh words in their language, and that they claimed their descent from the "Cambaraga"—white men who had come by sea 300 years before the Spanish. However, Harris' claims have never been independently verified.

Later writings

A collection of papers titled The Welch Indians pertaining to the "Madoc story" was published in 1797 by Reverend George Burder (d. 1832) and presented to the Missionary Society of London. In the collection he shows the plausibility in the legend by various stories that he considered reliable. He also shows various references (i.e. encyclopedias, historians, poets, secondary sources, personal letters of testimony) that he considered reliable. He leaves the idea with the reader: how could so many unrelated people conspire to come up with the same basic story of Madoc traveling to the Americas in the late twelfth century?

Several attempts to confirm Madoc's historicity have been made, but historians of early America, notably Samuel Eliot Morison, regard the story as a myth. Madoc's legend has been a notable subject for poets, however. The most famous account in English is Robert Southey's long 1805 poem Madoc, which uses the story to explore the poet's freethinking and egalitarian ideals. Fittingly, Southey wrote Madoc to help finance a trip of his own to America, where he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge hoped to establish a Utopian state they called a "Pantisocracy". Southey's poem in turn inspired twentieth-century poet Paul Muldoon to write Madoc: A Mystery, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1992. It explores what may have happened if Southey and Coleridge had succeeded in coming to America to found their "ideal state". In Russian, the noted poet Alexander S. Pushkin composed a short poem "Madoc in Wales" (Медок в Уаллах, 1829) on the topic.

John Smith, historian of Virginia, wrote in 1624 of the Chronicles of Wales reports Madoc went to the New World in 1170 A.D. (over 300 years before Columbus) with some men and women. Smith says the Chronicles say Madoc then went back to Wales to get more people and made a second trip back to the New World.

Legacy

Plaque at Fort Mountain State Park:Legends at Fort Mountain
Prince Madoc of Whales

The township of Madoc, Ontario, and the nearby village of Madoc are both named in the prince's memory, as are several local guest houses and pubs throughout North America and the United Kingdom. The Welsh town of Porthmadog (meaning "Madoc's Port" in English) and the village of Tremadog ("Madoc's Town") in the county of Gwynedd are actually named after the industrialist and Member of Parliament William Alexander Madocks, their principal developer, and additionally influenced by the legendary son of Owain Gwynedd, Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd. The Prince Madog, a research vessel owned by the University of Wales and P&O Maritime, set sail on July 26, 2001, on her maiden voyage.

A plaque at Fort Mountain State Park in Georgia recounts a nineteenth-century interpretation of the ancient stone wall that gives the site its name. The plaque repeats Tennessee governor John Sevier's statement that the Cherokees believed "a people called Welsh" had built a fort on the mountain long ago to repel Indian attacks.

In 1953, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a plaque on the shores of Mobile Bay, Alabama reading:

In memory of Prince Madoc a Welsh explorer who landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 and left behind with the Indians the Welsh language.

The plaque was removed by the Alabama Parks Service in 2008 and put in storage. Since then there has been much controversy in getting the plaque reinstalled.

References

Bibliography

• Ambrose, Stephen E. (15 February 1996). Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the opening of the American West. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684811073. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Armstrong, Zella (1950). Who Discovered America?: The Amazing Story of Madoc. Lookout Publishing Company. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Barnier, Paul (1990). The Age of Owain Gwynedd: an attempt at a connected account of the history of Wales from December, 1135, to November, 1170: to which are added several appendices on the chronology, etc., of the period. Felinfach: Llanerch. ISBN 978-0-947992-56-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bowers, Alfred (1 October 2004). Mandan social and ceremonial organization. U of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-6224-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bradshaw, Brendan (18 December 2003). British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533-1707. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-89361-9. Retrieved 2 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Brower, Jacob V (1904). Mandan. Press of McGill-Warner Co. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Caradoc, of Llancarfan. (1584). The historie of Cambria [by st. Caradoc] tr. by H. Lhoyd, corrected, augmented, and continued, by D.Powel. Repr. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Davies, A. (1984). "Prince Madoc and the discovery of America in 1477". Geographical Journal. 150 (3): 363–72. doi:10.2307/634332. JSTOR 634332.
• Curran, Bob (20 August 2010). Mysterious Celtic Mythology in American Folklore. Pelican Publishing. ISBN 978-1-58980-917-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Davies, John (25 January 2007). A History of Wales. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-0-14-192633-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Deacon, Richard (1967). Madoc and the discovery of America: some new light on an old controversy. Muller. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Durrett, Reuben Thomas (1908). Traditions of the Earliest Visits of Foreigners to North America, the First Formed and First Inhabited of the Continents. J.P. Morton & Company (Incorporated) printers to the Filson Club. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Fowler, Don D. (15 September 2010). Laboratory for Anthropology: Science and Romanticism in the American Southwest, 1846-1930. Utah Press, Universi. ISBN 978-1-60781-035-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Franklin, Caroline (2003): "The Welsh American Dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc legend." In English romanticism and the Celtic world, ed. by Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 69-84.
• Fritze, Ronald H. (15 May 2009). Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions. Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-86189-674-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Jefferson, Thomas (1903). The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Issued under the auspices of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Jones, D. I (1887). The Cambrian: A Magazine for the Welsh in America. D.I. Jones. p. 302. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kaufman, Will; Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl (31 March 2005). Britain And The Americas: Culture, Politics, And History: A Multidesciplinary Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 569. ISBN 978-1-85109-431-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Llwyd, Humphrey (2002). Cronica Walliae. University of Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-7083-1638-2. Retrieved 2 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• McClintock, James H. (31 October 2007). Mormon Settlement in Arizona: A Record of Peaceful Conquest of the Desert. BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-4264-3657-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Morison, Samuel Eliot (1971). The European Discovery of America. Retrieved 2 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mullaney, Steven (1995). The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-08346-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Newman, Marshall T. "The Blond Mandan: A Critical Review of an Old Problem". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology,. 6 (No.3 (Autumn, 1950)): pp. 255-272. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); |issue= has extra text (help); |pages= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |journal= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• O'Neill, Michael (27 September 2007). The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry Since 1900. OUP Oxford. pp. 157–. ISBN 978-0-19-929928-7. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pratt, Lynda (1 November 2007). Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 298. ISBN 978-0-7546-8184-7. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Smith, John (13 October 2006). The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, & The Summer Isles. Applewood Books. ISBN 978-1-55709-362-2. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Smith, Philip E. (1962). University Of Georgia - Laboratory of Archaeology Series. Report No. 4. Laboratory of Archaeology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Retrieved 2 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Traxel, William L (1 May 2004). Footprints of the Welsh Indians: Settlers in North America Before 1492. Algora Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87586-300-9. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wachtel, Michael (2011). A commentary to Pushkin's lyric poetry, 1826-1836. University of Wisconsin Pres. ISBN 978-0-299-28544-9. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Williams, David (1963). John Evans and the legend of Madoc, 1770-1799. University of Wales Press. Retrieved 1 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Williams, Gwyn A. (1979). Madoc: The Making of a Myth. Eyre Methuen. ISBN 978-0-413-39450-7. Retrieved 2 April 2013. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Williams, John S. (1842). The American Pioneer: A Monthly Periodical, Devoted to the Objects of the Logan Historical Society; Or, to Collecting and Publishing Sketches Relative to the Early Settlement and Successive Improvement of the Country. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Further reading

Legend

• Thom, James Alexander (1994): The Children of First Man. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-345-37005-1
• Winter, Pat (1990): Madoc. New York: Bantam. ISBN 978-0-413-39450-7
• Winter, Pat (1991): Madoc's Hundred. New York: Bantam. ISBN 978-0-553-28521-5
• Knight, Bernard, "Madoc, Prince of America", New York: St Martin's Press (1977)
• Lee Waldo, Anna (1999): "Circle of Stones". New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-97061-1
• Lee Waldo, Anna (2001): Circle of Stars. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-20380-1
• L'Engle, Madeleine (1978): A Swiftly Tilting Planet. New York: Dell Publishing. ISBN 0-440-40158-5
• Pryce, Malcolm (2005): With Madog to the New World. Y Lolfa. ISBN 978-0-86243-758-9
• Rosemary Clement-Moore (2009): The Splendor Falls. Delacorte Books for Young Readers. ISBN 978-0-385-73690-9

Juvenile

• Pugh, Ellen (1970): Brave His Soul: The Story of Prince Madog of Wales and His Discovery of America in 1170. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. ISBN 978-0-396-06190-8
• Thomas, Gwyn and Margaret Jones (2005): Madog. Talybont: Y Lolfa Cyf. ISBN 0-86243-766-0

Poetry

• Muldoon, Paul (1990): Madoc: A Mystery. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-14488-8 – New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-19557-9
• Southey, Robert (1805): Madoc. London : Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, and A. Constable and Co. Edinburgh. 19 editions. eBook

External links

• Madoc International Research Association
• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 at Project Gutenberg