Madoc - Madoc's story and background, The Welsh Indians, The legend's sources

Legendary Welsh prince, long believed by his countrymen to have discovered America in 1170. The story is in Hakluyt's Voyages (1582) and Lloyd and Powell's Cambria (1584). The essay by Thomas Stephens written in 1858 for the Eisteddfod, and published in 1893, proved it to be baseless.

Madoc (Madog or Madawg) ap Owain Gwynedd was a Welsh prince who, according to legend, discovered America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492. Madoc has been the subject of much historical speculation, but most scholars doubt that Madoc ever made a trip to North America, and some doubt the prince existed at all.

Madoc's story and background

His father, Owain Gwynedd, had at least 13 children from his two wives, and several more born out of wedlock, among them Madoc and his brother Rhirid. Madoc was disheartened, says the story, and he and Riryd set sail from Rhos-on-Sea to explore the western ocean with a small fleet of boats. They discovered a distant and abundant land where one hundred men disembarked to form a colony, and Madoc and the others returned to Wales to recruit settlers. Madoc's landing place has been suggested to be west Florida or Mobile Bay (in what is now Alabama) in the United States. Though no one ever returned who could have reported this, the story continues that Madoc's colonists travelled 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 Midwestern United States or the Great Plains.

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. However there is no contemporary record of a son named Madoc.

The Welsh Indians

A later development in the legend claimed the settlers were absorbed by groups of Native Americans, and their descendants remained somewhere on the American frontier for hundreds of years.

A number of later travellers claimed to have found the Welsh Indians, and one even claimed the tribe he visited venerated a copy of the Gospel written in Welsh.

In the early tales, the white Indians' specific European language ranged from Irish to Portuguese, and the tribe's name varied from teller to teller (often, the name was unattested elsewhere), but later versions settled on Welsh and the Mandan people, who differed strikingly from their neighbors in culture, language, and appearance. The painter George Catlin suggested the Mandans as 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 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 theory have drawn links between Madoc and the Mandan mythological figure Lone Man, who, according to one tale, provided his people with homes during and after a great deluge.

The legend's sources

The first written account of Madoc's story is in George Peckham's A True Report of the late Discoveries of the Newfound Landes (1583). 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.

Later speculation and fiction

Several attempts to confirm Madoc's historicity have been made, but Samuel Eliot Morison and most other historians disregard the story as myth. It explores the Madoc legend, mostly through association with Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who in 1794 had played with the idea of going to America to set up an "ideal state". In the 1990s author Pat Winter began the "Madoc Saga", which incorporates medieval and Amerindian history into the story, and has drawn praise from archaeologists and anthropologists for its accuracy. In 1978 Madeleine L'Engle incorporated Madoc into her science fiction novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet. A historically researched account of Prince Madoc's voyages can be found in James Alexander Thom's The Children of First Man.

The township of Madoc, Ontario and the nearby village of the same name are both named in the prince's memory, as are a number of local guest houses and pubs throughout North America and the UK. Despite the claims of romantic locals, however, the town of Porthmadog (until 1974, Portmadoc or Port Madoc) and the village of Tremadog in the county of Gwynedd are more likely named after the industrialist and Member of Parliament William Alexander Madocks (1773–1828) than the son of Owain.

The Prince Madog, a research vessel owned by the University of Wales, set sail on July 26, 2001 on her maiden voyage.