Madoc
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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 that the prince even existed at all.
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[edit] 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. Upon Owain's death in 1170, fighting broke out among the possible successors. 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. After gathering ten ships of men and women the prince sailed west a second time, never to return. 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 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 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. His reign was fraught by battles with other Welsh princes and with Henry II of England, and a bloody dispute broke out between his heirs Dafydd, Maelgwn, and Rhodri after he died. However, there is no contemporary record of a son named Madoc.
[edit] 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. The first to report an encounter with a Welsh-speaking Indian was the Reverend Morgan Jones, who was captured in 1669 by a tribe of Tuscaroras called the Doeg. The chief spared his life, however, when he heard Jones speak Welsh, a tongue he understood. Jones lived with the Doeg for several months preaching the Gospel in Welsh, and returned to the British Colonies where he recorded his adventure in 1686.
A number of later travelers claimed to have found the Welsh Indians, and one even claimed the tribe he visited venerated a copy of the Gospel written in Welsh. Stories of Cymric Indians became popular enough that even Lewis and Clark were ordered to look out for them, and folklore has long claimed that Louisville, Kentucky, was once home to a colony of Welsh-speaking Indians. 18th century Missouri River explorer John Evans of Waunfawr, Wales took up his journey in part to find the Welsh-descended "Padoucas" or "Madogwys" tribes. The legend was not apparently restricted to whites; in 1810, John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had had with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River. The Chief said the forts were built by the white people who had once lived in the area as protection against the ancestors of the Cherokee. They were called "Welsh" and their leader was "Modok". How much of the original conversation, which was supposed to have occurred in 1782, was accurately related in Sevier's letter in 1810 is of course debatable.
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.
[edit] Sources of the legend
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). 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). Such stories served to bolster British claims in the New World versus those of Spain; 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 attested until over a century later. Morgan Jones' tract is the first account, and was printed by The Gentleman's Magazine in 1740, launching a slew of publications on the subject. There is no genetic or archaeological evidence that the Mandans are related to the Cymry, however, and John Evans and Lewis and Clark reported they had found no Welsh Indians. Descendants of 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.
[edit] 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 has been a popular subject in fiction, however, both from authors that believe it and those that do not. The most influential version is given by Robert Southey in his poem Madoc. This epic inspired Paul Muldoon to write Madoc — A Mystery, a long, multi-layered poem which won him the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. 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 information that went into the book was researched for years as the author is a professor of Journalism at Indiana University.
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.
[edit] References
- Davies, John (1990): A History of Wales. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-014581-8.
- Gilbert, Adrian / Wilson, Alan / Blackett, Baram (1999): The Holy Kingdom: Quest for the Real King Arthur. : Corgi Adult. ISBN 0-552-14489-4
- Hakluyt, Richard (1582); Beeching, Jack (editor) (1972), Voyages and Discoveries : Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation. London: Penguin books. ISBN 0-14-043073-3.
- 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
- Olson, Dana (1987): The Legend of Prince Madoc Discoverer of America in 1170 a.D. and the History of the Welsh Colonists Also Known as the White Indians Or the Moon-Eyed People.
- Powel, David (editor) (1585): Historiae Libri Sex, Magna Et Fide Et Diligentia Conscripti: Ad Britannici codicis fidem correcti...prefixus est catalogus Regem Britanniae: per Davidem Pouelum... [Including:] Giraldus Cambriensis, Itinerarium Cambriae... & Cambriae Descriptio. London: 8vo. Henry Denham & Ralph Newbury for Edmund Bollifant.
(This is actually an abridgement of Geoffrey of Monmouth's (1100?–1154) Historia regum Britanniae, together with Giraldus Cambrensis' (1146?–1220?) Itinerarium Cambriae and Cambriae Descriptio, each with their own title-page.) - 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 0-396-06190-7.
- Williams, Gwyn A. (1987): Madoc: The Making of a Myth. Oxford. ISBN 0-19-285178-0.
[edit] eBook
- Southey, Robert (1812): Madoc, an epic poem in two vols.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
- MADOC 1170 (Howard Kimberley) ("Sources of Evidence")
- The Church of Y Tylwyth Teg (Wanner, Jayne: "A Consideration: Was America Discovered in 1170 by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd of Wales?")
- Adrian Gilbert (advert for Gilbert/Wilson/Blackett, The Holy Kingdom with summary)
- Early British Kingdoms (David Nash Ford) ("Mynydd-y-Gaer: Burial Place of Uther, Arthur or Athrwys?")
- The Discovery of America (from "Historic UK" site)
- NewsWales ("Did the Welsh discover America?" – 2002-08-26)
- icWales ("New row over who discovered America" – 2004-03-09)
- Britannica entry on Madoc
- Williams, John, 1791: An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170, available at Project Gutenberg.
