Madoc Totally Explained

Everything about Madog totally explained

Madoc (Standard Welsh: Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd was, according to folklore, a Welsh prince who discovered America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492. Madoc's existence has been the subject of much historical speculation, but there's no contemporary record of his existence, let alone evidence that he travelled to the New World.

Madoc's story and background

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 by battles with other Welsh princes and with Henry II of England. At his death, a bloody dispute broke out between his heirs Dafydd, Maelgwn, and Rhodri. 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.
   Upon Owain's death in 1170, fighting broke out among the possible successors. Madoc was disheartened, says the story, and he and Rhirid set sail from Llandrillo (Rhos-on-Sea) in the cantref of Rhos 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 some 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, Alabama, in the United States.
   Although the folklore tradition acknowledges that no witness ever returned from the second colonial expedition, the story reports 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.
   A memorial tablet has been erected at Fort Morgan, Mobile Bay which reads:
"In memory of Prince Madog, a Welsh explorer, who landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 and left behind, with the Indians, the Welsh language."

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 Welsh Indians became popular enough that even Lewis and Clark were ordered to look out for them. Folk tradition 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.
   There is a persistent tradition 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. These "moon-eyed people" were said to have fair skin, blonde hair and opalescent eyes. Although it has also been postulated that this wall was in fact built by Hernando de Soto to defend against the Creek Indians around 1540, the "moon-eyed people", whose unusual description by Native American oral tradition would match that of a Caucasian, have still been linked to Prince Madoc and his fellow transplanted Welshmen. Benjamin Smith Barton considered in his writings these "moon-eyed people" who "could not see in the day-time" to be an albino race. John Haywood also gives mention to the legend in his The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee although the later work was an effort to prove that the native tribes of Tennessee were, in fact, the descendants of ancient Hebrews.
   The legend of the Welsh Indians was apparently not restricted to whites; in 1810, John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he'd 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 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.

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. There are also claims that the Welsh historian and genealogist Gutyn Owen wrote about Madoc before 1492. However, Gwyn Williams in Madoc, the Making of a Myth, makes it clear that Madoc isn't mentioned in any of Owen's surviving manuscripts.
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 Mandan Indians are related to the Welsh, however, and John Evans and Lewis and Clark reported they'd 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.

Later speculation and fiction

Several attempts to confirm Madoc's historicity have been made, but most historians of early America, notably Samuel Eliot Morison, regard the story as myth. Madoc's voyage has been a notable subject for poets, however. Welsh language poet T. Gwynn Jones wrote one of his best-known poems, Madog, on the subject. The most famous account in English is Robert Southey's long poem Madoc, which in turn inspired twentieth-century poet Paul Muldoon to write Madoc — A Mystery. Muldoon's multi-layered poem 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".
   Novelists have also handled the Madoc legend. Madeleine L'Engle's 1978 science fiction novel, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, imagines a descendant of Madoc who threatens the world with nuclear annihilation. In 1990 and 1991 Pat Winter published the two-volume Madoc Saga. Journalist James Alexander Thom also researched Madoc's voyage for his 1995 novel The Children of First Man. The fantasy work Excalibur, by American novellist Sanders Anne Laubenthal, is set in Mobile and is based on the presumption that Madoc brought King Arthur's sword Excalibur to the New World.
   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 United Kingdom. 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 and VT Group, set sail on July 26, 2001, on her maiden voyage.
   Believers in the voyage of Madoc have erected monuments to him in the United States. In 1953 a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a plaque near Fort Morgan on Mobile Bay commemorating "Prince Madoc, a Welsh explorer, who landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 and left behind, with the Indians, the Welsh language." This plaque was later removed by the Alabama Parks Department. 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 claim that the Cherokees believed "a people called Welsh" had built a fort on the mountain long ago to repel Indian attacks.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Madog'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://madoc.totallyexplained.com">Madoc Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.