be considered as reduced to two- the bards Guttun Owen and Cynfrig ab Gronow.1

The story is briefly this: When Owen Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales, was gathered to his fathers, a strife arose among his sons as to who should reign in his stead. The eldest legitimate son, Edward, was put aside, or put himself aside, as unfit to govern, "because of the maime upon his face," he was known as "Edward with the broken-nose," and the government was seized by Howel who was illegitimate, "a base son begotten of an Irish woman." But the next brother, David, refused allegiance to this Howel, and civil war followed. At length the usurper was killed in battle, and the rightful heritage established, David holding the reins of government as regent till the son of Edward, the eldest brother, was of age. In this contention Madoc took no part, but endeavored to escape from it; which, inasmuch as it was a struggle for the lineal succession of his family, was not much to his credit. Leaving his 1 Compare Lyttleton's History of Henry II., vol. vi. An Enquiry Concerning the First Discovery of America, by John Williams, LL. D. London, 1791. Jones's Musical Relicks of Welsh Bards, vol. i. From Dr. Powell's History, Hakluyt copied the story at length, referring also to Guttun Owen, - asserting, however, in his first edition, of 1589, that the land which Madoc reached was, in his opinion, Mexico; in his second edition, of 1600, that it was some part of the West Indies. In this, as in most other accounts of early voyagers, later writers have followed Hakluyt. But here, Dr. Belknap interposes a word of caution. "The design," he says, "of his (Hakluyt) bringing forward the voyage of Madoc appears, from what he says of Columbus, to have been the asserting of a discovery prior to his, and consequently the right of the Crown of England to the sovereignty of America; a point at that time warmly contested between the two nations. The remarks which the same author makes on several other voyages, evidently tend to the establishment of that claim." [American Biography, etc., by Jeremy Belknap, p. 65.] While of Powell, from whom Hakluyt copies, Robertson says: "The memory of a transaction so remote must have been very imperfectly preserved, and would require to be confirmed by some author of greater credit, and nearer to the æra of Madoc's voyage than Powell." [Robertson's History of America, vol. ii., note 17.] Thus the story at the outset has to contend with a reflection upon the credibility of the author who first promulgated it, and upon the motive of him on whose authority it has generally been repeated. But, on the other hand, it is the registers of the Welsh abbeys of Conway and Strat Flur, copied by Guttun Owen, and the statement of Cynfrig ab Gronow, upon which Powell, or rather Humphrey Llwyd, the translator of Caradoc's History, relied as authority for the tradition. The writings of these bards are supposed to be lost; but if they really related the story, the trustworthiness of Powell, and the motives of Hakluyt, are of no importance whatever, as it was told by the earlier writers twelve years before Columbus made his first voyage. If Madoc's discovery-supposing there were any - was made upon knowledge, that knowledge could only have come from Iceland or Greenland.

MADOC'S VOYAGE AND HIS COLONY.

Madoc's

69 brothers (about 1170) to fight it out among them, he got together a fleet and put to sea in search of adventures. He sailed Historical westward, leaving Ireland to the north, which, it may be account of remarked, is nearly the only thing he could do in sailing voyage. from Wales, unless he laid his course northward through the Irish Sea. But at length he came to an unknown country, where the natives differed from any people he had ever seen before, and all things were strange and new. Seeing that this land was pleasant and fertile, he put on shore and left behind most of those in his ships and returned to Wales.

Coming among his friends again, after so eventful a voyage, he told them of the fair and extensive region he had found; there, he assured them, all could live in peace and plenty, instead of cutting each other's

throats for the possession of a rugged district of rocks and mountains. The advantages he offered were so obvious, or his eloquence The Welsh so persuasive, that enough determined to go with him to fill Colony. ten ships. There is no account of their ever having returned to Wales; but on the contrary, it is said, "they followed the manners of the land they came to, and used the language they found there," a statement which, if true, shows, not only that they did not return, but that some intercourse was preserved with their native land. Their numbers, nevertheless, must have been sufficient to have formed a considerable colony, and if, as the narrative asserts, the new country "was void of inhabitants" - meaning, probably, that it was only sparsely peopled-it is difficult to believe that they could have become so entirely assimilated to the savages as to lose their own customs and their own tongue.

Testimonies

ence.

Moreover, if such were the fact it destroys all other evidence, which was supposed to be subsequently found, of the existence of such a colony. That supposed evidence is, that a tribe of Indians of light complexion and speaking the old British language, was found within the present limits of the United States in the seventeenth century, and that traces of such a people were still evident at a quite recent period. The earliest testimony on this point is a letter1 to Dr. Thomas Lloyd, of Pennsylvania, and by him transmitted to his brother, Mr. C. H. S. Lloyd, in Wales. The letter purported to have been written by the Rev. Morgan Jones, and was dated New York, March to its exist- 10th, 1685-6, more than half a century before its publication in the Magazine. The Rev. Mr. Jones declares that in the year 1660 twenty-five years before the date of the letter- he was sent as chaplain of an expedition from Virginia to Port Royal, South Carolina, where he remained eight months. Suffering much from want of food, he and five others at the end of that time started to return to Virginia by land. On the way they were taken prisoners by an Indian tribe, the Tuscaroras, and condemned to die. On hearing this sentence, Mr. Jones "being very much dejected," exclaimed "in the British (i. e. Welsh) tongue," Welsh) tongue," "Have I escaped so many dangers, and must I now be knocked on the Head like a Dog." Immediately he was seized around the waist by a War Captain, belonging to the Doegs, and assured in the same language that he should not die. He was immediately taken to the "Emperor of the Tuscaroras," and, with his five companions, ransomed. The providential Doeg took them to his own village, where they were kindly welcomed and hospitably entertained. For four months Mr. Jones remained among these Indians, often conversing with them, and preaching to them three times a week in the British language. The conclusion is that these Indians were descendants of the Welsh colonists under Madoc.

The Mr. Lloyd to whom this letter was sent, subsequently adduced some oral and hearsay testimony, to the same effect; as, for example, that a sailor declared he had met with some Indians on the coast, somewhere between Virginia and Florida, who informed him in good Welsh, that their people came from Gwynedd, North Wales. But such testimony is so vague that it may be set aside without hesitation, leaving the letter of Mr. Jones the sole evidence of this Welsh survival on this continent, within the first century of its settlement by the English. In the next century, however, there came forth fresh witnesses.

First. A missionary from New York, a Mr. Charles Beatty, travel1 First published in The (London) Gentleman's Magazine, vol. x., 1740.

SUPPOSED TRACES OF THE WELSH.

71

ling in 1776, to the Southwest, four or five hundred miles, though he did not himself see any of these Welsh Indians, met with several others who had seen and talked with them. A Mr. Benjamin Sutton assured him that he had visited an Indian town on the west side of the Mississippi, whose people were not so tawny as other natives, and whose language was the Welsh. They had a book which they cherished with great care, though none among them could read it, which Mr. Sutton assumed to be a Welsh Bible, -manuscript, it must have been, as the art of printing was not invented when Madoc is supposed to have left Wales, in 1170. One Levi Hicks, who had been among Indians from his youth, also told Mr. Beatty that he had visited such a town west of the Mississippi, where the language spoken, he was informed, was Welsh ; and Joseph, Mr. Beatty's interpreter, had seen natives whom he supposed to be of the same tribe, and who, he was sure, spoke Welsh, because he had some little knowledge of that tongue. Mr. Beatty, in repeating these statements, relates, in corroboration of them, the story of the Rev. Mr. Jones, adding to it, however, that that clergyman had also found a Welsh Bible in possession of the Doegs, which they could not read, but held him in all the more esteem because he could, a circumstance

Welshman.

which Mr. Jones does not mention in his letter, but would hardly have omitted had it been true.

Second. In 1785 was published a narration by a Capt. Isaac Stewart, to the effect that, having been taken prisoner by the Indians, with a Welshman named David, about the year 1767, they were carried seven hundred miles up the Red River, when they came to "a nation of Indians remarkably white, and whose hair was of a red color, - at least, mostly so." The Welshman found these people were of his own race. Their story was that their forefathers came from a foreign country and landed on a coast east of the Mississippi, which, from the description, must have been Florida. When afterward the Spaniards took possession of Mexico they fled west of the Mississippi, and up the Red River; and, as an evidence of the truth of this account, they showed to Captain Stewart some rolls of parchment, covered with writing in blue ink, which they kept wrapped up in skins with great Unfortunately neither Captain Stewart nor his Welsh companion could read these precious documents.

Third. Mr. Williams, the author of "An Enquiry Concerning the First Discovery of America by the Europeans," from whose book we condense these narratives, asserts on an authority for which he vouches as respectable and truthful, that a Welshman, living on the banks of the Ohio, declares, in a letter dated October 1, 1778, that he had been several times among Indians who spoke the old British, and that he knew of another person in Virginia who had visited a tribe of Welsh Indians living on the Missouri River, four hundred miles above its junction with the Mississippi.

Such, it has been assumed, is the conclusive evidence that the descendants of Madoc and his companions, who migrated from Wales in 1170, were seen about five hundred years later in 1660— somewhere between Jamestown, Virginia, and Port Royal, South Carolina, having carefully preserved their nationality and language. That about one hundred years afterward — in 1767 the same tribe, or others of the same lineage, were living on the Red River, seven hundred miles from its mouth, still speaking the Welsh tongue; that ten years afterward a similar people, with the same language, were seen by two witnesses somewhere in the same region; that ten years later still, another person knew of a similar tribe on the Missouri; and that Indians had been met with by other persons at various times and in various places, who spoke Welsh. The discrepancies in the accounts, save the one remarkable fact that some of the witnesses observe that these Indians were white, while others do not mention a peculiarity so striking that it could hardly fail, if it existed, to excite their wonder, are not greater than are consistent with truth under the ordinary rules of evidence. But the one point on which they all agree the speaking of ancient British-is the most formidable argument, and by the probability of its truth all these narratives can be most conclusively tested.

The thorough exploration of all the territory of the United States within the last half century has left little to be learned of any of the Indian tribes, and there are none among them known to speak a tongue which would be recognized as Welsh. Yet if there was such a tribe a hundred, or even two hundred years ago, who had for six hundred years preserved their language when surrounded by a savage, alien race, it is hardly possible that a century later, such a people could have become so utterly extinct, or so absorbed by savages whose influence they had so long resisted, as to leave no certain trace of their origin.

But all that is pretended by the later inquirers is, that a tribe of Indians, the Mandans, showed, if not traces of an intermixture with the blood of the whites, at least a marked difference between themselves