The sign erected in 1953 by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) at Fort Mountain State Park on the shores of Alabama Bay left little room for doubt or ambiguity: “In Memory of Prince Madoc, a world explorer who landed on the shores of Mobile Bay in 1170 and left behind, with the Indians, the Welsh language.” The sign (now in storage) expresses a belief that a Welsh prince journeyed to and settled in America more than 320 years before Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. But is this veritable history, or is it legend?
The standard version of the tale begins with Owain of Gwynedd, an authentic historical person who ruled in twelfth-century Wales. Owain’s death in 1169 CE precipitated a major disagreement over succession, inspiring one of his many sons, Madoc, to leave Wales. According to the story, Madoc boarded a ship, along with a brother, Rhirid, and sailed west, never to be heard from again.
The sign erected by the DAR reflects an elaboration of that tale, adding the claim that Madoc reached the shores of North America during his journey. In further iterations of the folktale, Madoc returned to Wales to share the news of this unspoiled paradise in a successful effort to encourage additional migration. If the story were true, it would mean that Madoc established a British colonial beachhead in North America long before the sixteenth-century arrival of the Spanish in the southeast. Those supporting the authenticity of the story claim that archaeological sites in the Americas provide evidence of these twelfth-century Welsh interlopers and that historical references to light-skinned, blue-eyed, and even Welsh-speaking Indians represent eyewitness reports of the descendants of those Welsh settlers along with the progeny of intermarriage between them and local Indians.
Myths of European exploration in the Americas include the story of Prince Madoc’s Journey, an unproven story of a twelfth-century Welsh nobleman who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and made contact with Native Americans in the area of present-day Mobile Bay in Alabama. The myth supported weak claims that Great Britain, rather than Spain, discovered the New World first and thus had right of possession. (Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo)
Any assessment of the historicity of the Madoc tale runs into serious problems from the outset, beginning with Madoc himself. It is certainly possible that the tale of a disaffected Welsh prince who left Wales during a family dispute, sailing west into the great ocean, was part of an oral tradition passed down by bards and storytellers. However, the earliest written reference to a Prince Madoc dates to no earlier than the middle of the fifteenth century.
The earliest written claim that Madoc arrived in America is more recent still. John Dee (1527–1608), a brilliant scholar and important adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, was intent on rationalizing a British claim to the lands of North America, one that superseded that of the Spanish who based their claim upon an active campaign of exploration in the American southeast in the early sixteenth century (Pánfilo de Narváez in 1527 and Hernando de Soto in 1539). In 1580, using Madoc’s story, Dee asserted British precedence over those claims: “The Lord Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynedd, Prince of Northwales, led a Colonie and inhabited Terra Florida or thereabowts” (Williams 1987, 39).
Dee maintained that Madoc’s twelfth-century settlement of North America supported a claim of British ownership of “all the Coasts and Islands beginning at or abowt Terra Florida … unto Atlantis going Northerly, and then to all the northern islands extending as far as Russia” (Williams 1987, 39–40). That was a breathtaking assertion and reveals that the key element at the root of this version of the folktale was a blatant manipulation of facts in the sixteenth century in a cynical effort to buttress a land claim.
Alas, archaeological and biological evidence provide no support for Dee’s claims. No Welsh sites or artifacts have been found in pre-Columbian contexts in the New World. This stands in stark contrast to the discovery (at L’anse aux Meadows and elsewhere in eastern Canada) of archaeological evidence of a Norse presence that predates the Columbus voyages. Furthermore, no genetic evidence has been found for an influx of Europeans into the Americas before the Spanish entrada, and no linguistic evidence has been found to confirm claims that Native American languages (especially that of the Mandan) contain elements of the Welsh language.
Assertions that well-built or impressive construction on the part of American Indians was, itself, evidence of a Welsh presence in antiquity were based, not on logic, but on racialist assumptions of Native American primitiveness. The story of Prince Madoc is an interesting bit of folklore. Perhaps of greater interest, however, is how this particular story became useful, providing a readymade framework upon which new “facts” could be tethered to support British claims of ownership of North America.
Kenneth Feder
See also Chariots of the Gods; Columbus, Christopher; Founding Myths; Hudson, Henry; Mound Builder Myth; Roanoke
Further Reading
Faulkner, Charles. 1971. The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Fell, Barry. 1989. America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World. New York: Pocket Books.
Huyghe, Patrick. 1992. Columbus Was Last: From 200,000 to 1492, a Heretical History of Who Was First. San Antonio, TX: Anomalist Books.
Joseph, Frank, ed. 2012. The Lost Worlds of Ancient America: Compelling Evidence of Ancient Immigrants, Lost Technologies, and Places of Power. Pompton Plains, NJ: Career Press.
Williams, Gwyn A. 1987. Madoc: The Legend of the Welsh Discovery of America. New York: Oxford University Press.