Mediaeval texts The earliest certain reference to a seafaring man named Madoc or Madog occurs in a by the Welsh poet
Maredudd ap Rhys (fl. 1450–1483) of
Powys that mentions a Madog who was a descendant of Owain Gwynedd and who voyaged to the sea. The poem is addressed to a local squire, thanking him on a patron's behalf for a fishing net. Madog is referred to as "Splendid Madog ... / Of Owain Gwynedd's line, / He desired not land ... / Or worldly wealth but the sea". In around 1250 to 1255, a Flemish writer called Willem identifies himself in his poem
Van den Vos Reinaerde as "
Willem die Madoc maecte" (Willem, the author of Madoc, known as "Willem the Minstrel"). Though no copies of Willem's "Madoc" survive, according to
Gwyn Williams: "In the seventeenth century a fragment of a reputed copy of the work is said to have been found in Poitiers". The text provides no topographical details about North America but says Madoc, who is not related to Owain in the fragment, discovered an island paradise, where he intended "to launch a new kingdom of love and music". There are also claims the Welsh poet and genealogist
Gutun Owain wrote about Madoc before 1492. Gwyn Williams in
Madoc, the Making of a Myth said Madoc is not mentioned in any of Gutun Owain's surviving manuscripts.
Elizabethan and Stuart claims to the New World The Madoc legend reached its greatest prominence during the
Elizabethan era, when Welsh and English writers used it to bolster British claims in the
New World against those of Spain. The earliest-surviving full account of Madoc's voyage, the first to make the claim Madoc visited America before Columbus, appears in
Humphrey Llwyd's
Cronica Walliae (published in 1559), an English adaptation of the
Brut y Tywysogion.
John Dee used Llwyd's manuscript when he submitted the treatise "Title Royal" to
Queen Elizabeth I in 1580, which stated: "The Lord Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynned, Prince of Gwynedd, led a Colonie and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabouts" in 1170. The story was first published by
George Peckham as
A True Report of the late Discoveries of the Newfound Landes (1583) and, like Dee, it was used to support English claims to the Americas. The story 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). According to Dee, not only Madoc, but also
Brutus of Troy and
King Arthur, had conquered lands in the Americas and therefore their heir Elizabeth I had a priority claim there. According to the 1584
Historie of Cambria by
David Powel, 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. In 1170, they purportedly discovered a distant, abundant land where about 100 men, women and children disembarked to form a colony. According to
Cronica Walliae and many works derived from it, Madoc and some others returned to Wales to recruit additional settlers. After gathering eleven ships and 120 men, women and children, Madoc and his recruiters sailed west a second time to "that Westerne countrie", and ported in "Mexico", a claim
Reuben T. Durrett cited in his work
Traditions of the earliest visits of foreigners to north America, and stated Madoc never returned again to Wales. In 1624, John Smith, a historian of Virginia, used the
Chronicles of Wales to report that Madoc went to the New World in 1170, over 300 years before Columbus, with some men and women. Smith says the
Chronicles say Madoc returned to Wales to get more people and traveled back to the New World. In the late 1600s,
Thomas Herbert popularised the stories told by Dee and Powel, adding more detail from unknown sources, suggesting Madoc may have landed in Canada, Florida, or Mexico, and reporting Mexican sources stated they used
currachs.
"Welsh Indians" as potential descendants As immigrants came into contact with more groups of
Native Americans in the United States, at least thirteen real tribes, five unidentified tribes, and three unnamed tribes have been suggested as "Welsh Indians". Eventually, the legend settled on identifying the Welsh Indians with the
Mandan people, who were said to differ from their neighbours in culture, language, and appearance. Nevertheless, historians of early America, notably including
Samuel Eliot Morison agree that the voyage story is fictional. On 26 November 1608, Peter Wynne, a member of Captain
Christopher Newport's exploration party to the villages of the
Monacan people—
Virginia Siouan speakers above the falls of the
James River in
Virginia—wrote a letter to
John Egerton informing him some members of Newport's party believed the pronunciation of the Monacans' language resembled "Welch", which Wynne spoke, and asked Wynne to act as an interpreter. The Monacan were among those non-Algonquian tribes the
Algonquians collectively referred to as "Mandoag". The Monacan tribe spoke to Wynne about the lore of the
Moon-eyed people who were short bearded men with blue eyes and pale skin, they were sensitive to light and only emerged at night. The story has been associated with the legend of the Welsh settlement of Madog in the
Great Smoky Mountains within the
Appalachian Mountains. The Reverend Morgan Jones told
Thomas Lloyd,
William Penn's deputy, he had been captured in 1669 in
North Carolina by members of a tribe identified as the
Doeg, who were said to be a part of the
Tuscarora. There is no evidence the Doeg proper were part of the Tuscarora. According to Jones, the chief spared his life when he heard Jones speak Welsh, which he understood. Jones' report says he lived for several months with the Doeg, preaching the
Gospel in Welsh, and then returned to the
British Colonies, where he recorded his adventure in 1686 in a letter originally sent to Lloyd which after passing through other hands was printed in ''
The Gentleman's Magazine'' by Theophilus Evans, Vicar of St David's in Brecon. This launched a slew of publications on the subject. The historian
Gwyn A. Williams commented: "This is a complete
farrago and may have been intended as a hoax".
Thomas Jefferson had heard of Welsh-speaking Indian tribes. In a letter written to
Meriwether Lewis on 22 January 1804, Jefferson wrote of searching for the Welsh Indians who were "said to be up the Missouri". The historian
Stephen E. Ambrose wrote in his history book
Undaunted Courage Jefferson believed the "Madoc story" to be true, and instructed the
Lewis and Clark Expedition to find the descendants of the Madoc Welsh Indians. Neither they nor
John Evans found any. 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
Cherokee chief
Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications along the
Alabama River. According to Sevier, the chief said 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. In 1799, Sevier had written of the discovery of six skeletons in brass armour bearing the
coat of arms of Wales, and 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 sources that stated Welsh people under Owen Ap Zuinch had travelled to America in the twelfth century, over 300 years before Christopher Columbus. According to Hinde, in 1799 near
Jeffersonville, Indiana on the
Ohio River, six soldiers were exhumed with brass
breastplates that bore Welsh coats of arms. bull boat to be similar to the Welsh
coracle. The painter
George Catlin in
North American Indians (1841), speculated that the Mandans were descendants of Madoc and his fellow voyagers; Catlin found the round Mandan Bull Boat similar to the Welsh
coracle, and he thought the advanced architecture of Mandan villages must have been learnt from Europeans; advanced North American societies such as the
Mississippian and
Hopewell traditions were not well known in Catlin's time. Catlin also described the Mandan as having blonde hair, which he saw as evidence of interbreeding with Europeans.
Rudolf Friedrich Kurz wrote that "What Catlin calls blonde hair among the Mandan is nothing more than sun-burned hair that is not continually smeared with grease.... I may mention, also, that the lighter color of some Indians' skin (not only Mandan) is easily traced to the 'whites.' The explorer
David Thompson wrote that his time had "been spent in noticing their Manners and conversing about their Policy, Wars, Country, Traditions, &c &c in the Evenings I attended their Amusements of Dancing Singing &c. which were always conducted with the highest order and Decorum .. . after their Idea of thinking." but made no mention of their skin colour or any customs similar to European ones.
François-Antoine Larocque visited the Crow and the Mandan. He commented on the Crow saying ""Such of them as do not make practice of exposing themselves naked to the sun have a skin nearly as white as that of white people.... most of those Indians, as they do not so often go naked, are generally of a fairer skin than most of the other tribes with which I am acquainted." He wrote nothing about the skin color of the Mandan. Professor James D. Mclaird wrote that "According to physical anthropologist Marshall T. Newman, Catlin and Kurz were both describing a kind of achromotrichia, or premature graying, a genetic trait. Newman has examined contemporary evidence carefully and discovered that this genetic trait existed in several Indian tribes, including the Mandan, and it caused streaks of blondness and premature graying of the hair." This view was popular at the time but has since been disputed by the bulk of scholarship. The Welsh Indian legend continued into the 1840s and 1850s; this time,
George Ruxton (Hopis, 1846), P. G. S. Ten Broeck (Zunis, 1854), and Abbé Emmanuel Domenach (Zunis, 1860), among others, claimed the
Zunis,
Hopis, and
Navajo were of Welsh descent.
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 took three Hopi men to
Salt Lake City, where they were "besieged by Welshmen wanting them to utter Celtic words", to no avail. Llewelyn Harris, a Welsh-American
Mormon missionary who visited the Zuni in 1878, wrote they had many Welsh words in their language, and that they claimed their descent from the "Cambaraga"—white men who had arrived by sea 300 years before the Spanish. Harris's claims have never been independently verified.
Modern developments showing where the Daughters of the American Revolution supposed Madoc had landed in 1170. According to Fritze (1993), Madoc's landing place has been suggested to be "Mobile, Alabama; Florida; Newfoundland; Newport, Rhode Island; Yarmouth, Nova Scotia; Virginia; points in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean including the mouth of the Mississippi River; the Yucatan; the isthmus of Tehuantepec, Panama; the Caribbean coast of South America; various islands in the West Indies and the Bahamas along with Bermuda; and the mouth of the Amazon River". Madoc's people are reported to be the founders of various civilisations such as the
Aztec, the
Maya, and the
Inca.
American settlement myths at
Devil's Backbone along the
Ohio River to be the work of Welsh colonists. The tradition of Madoc's purported voyage was he left Wales in 1170 to land in Mobile Bay in
Alabama, United States and then travelled up the
Coosa River which connects several southern counties of Alabama,
Tennessee and
Georgia. A legend passed down through generations of American Indians was of 'yellow-haired giants' who had briefly settled in Tennessee, then moved to Kentucky and then Southern Indiana, also involving the area of
Southern Ohio, all of which became known as "The Dark and Forbidden Land", specifically the area of "
Devil's Backbone" on the
Ohio River. The story was passed on from the native American Chief Tobacco of the
Piankeshaw tribe to
George Rogers Clark who
settled the city
Clarksville, Indiana around the 1800s. The chief spoke of a great battle between White and Red Indians, where the White Indians were slain. Supposedly, a graveyard of thousands of skeletons was found by Maj. John Harrison, but later washed away in a flood. Clark and the early settlers of his county had found
European armor-clad skeletons thought to be ancient Welshmen, as well as ancient coins. According to local
Cherokee tradition, the medieval settlers intermarried with the natives in
Chattanooga, Tennessee and built stone forts there. It was said the modern 19th century settlers found Natives throughout the area who could converse in the
Welsh language. Details of the discoveries are as follows: • According to a folk tradition, a site called "Devil's Backbone" at
Rose Island, about upstream from
Louisville, Kentucky, was once home to a colony of Welsh-speaking Indians. The 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. • In north-west Georgia, legends of the Welsh have become part of a myth surrounding the then unknown origin of a Native American-built rock wall on
Fort Mountain. According to the historian Gwyn A. Williams, author of
Madoc: The Making of a Myth, a Cherokee tradition concerning that ruin may have been influenced by contemporaneous European-American legends of "Welsh Indians". The story of Welsh explorers is one of several legends about that site. • In north-eastern Alabama, there is a story the Welsh Caves in
DeSoto State Park were built by Madoc's party; local native tribes were not known to have practices such stonework or excavation that was found on the site. ==Legacy==