nearly a century after Columbus' voyage, and more than four centuries after Madoc's presumed disappearance. It obtained its great currency chiefly through fraud and misrepresentation. It was supported by what can only be characterised as impudent and manifest falsehoods; for the narratives of those who came upon Welsh-speaking Indians are, from internal evidence, nothing else.
How then did the story originate? There are traces of Madoc traditions—though not such tradition s we find in Powel—in Meredydd. Coupling these with the statement that Madoc went across the broad sea, or "Morwerydd," it becomes highly probable that Madoc's voyage was only to Ireland. In early Welsh, "Morwerydd" regularly means the Irish Sea, and not the Atlantic. In the Brut y Tywysogion, we are told that Owain Gwynedd married an Irish lady. Another early Welsh writer couples Riryd, Madoc's brother, with Irish estates, and Riryd is found in the stories sailing with Madoc to America. The truth, perhaps, is then that Madoc retired from his native land and settled down for good in Ireland. If he made a journey hack to Wales to persuade more Welshmen to follow him there is nothing very improbable; from his absence would easily arise the stories of his disappearance. The legend borrowed many details from Columbus. Both Madoc and Columbus sail west, discover a new country, leave a small force, return home, go back to find the garrison mostly dead, and make speeches to persuade settlers to follow them. It is to be feared that Powel derived more from Columbian sources than from his hypothetical manuscripts.
Nor are the facts of the narrative in themselves probable. It is, to say the least, extremely unlikely that the Welsh should have succeeded in crossing the Atlantic in the twelfth century, before the invention of the compass,[1] and before the art of navigation had been
- ↑ The compass, according to Torfæus, was used by the Norsemen about the middle of the fifteenth century ('Hist. Rev. Norvegicarum' [Hafn, 1711], iv. 4, p.345), in approximately the modern manner. Raymond Lully [1272] was well acquainted with it; Gauthier d'Espinois (middle thirteenth century) refers to its polarity; Brunetto Latini [1260] mentions it in his Enyclopædia. It appears to have heen known in Scotland at the beginning of the fourteenth century, as Barbour, writing in 1375, says that King David, when crossing in 1306 from Arran to Carrick, "na nedil had na stane." Chaucer, in 1301, alludes to the thirty-two points. Probably it was introduced by the Arabs and the Crusaders, as Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acon in Palestine [1218], speaks of the magnetic needle as "most necessary for seafarers," and the Crusader De Beauvais also alludes to it. A still earlier allusion is found in Neckam, De Utensilibus [twelfth century]. Encyclopæd. Brit., ed. 9, "Compass."
