Page:Royalnavyhistory01clow.djvu/347

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1170.]
THE WELSH NO SEAMEN.
313

perfected. The Norsemen, it is true, made very long voyages at an early date, but they usually coasted as much as possible, and in sailing from Norway to Winland would go by Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, when the tract of open sea to be crossed was comparatively small. The Welsh had no reputation as navigators;[1] and their bards do not mention other voyages; indeed, they hardly allude to ships. Norse literature is full of ships and nothing else. The ships of the Welsh are perfectly unknown to us, and therefore it is useless to speculate upon them. There is no evidence to show that they had advanced much beyond the coracle at this date: we do not often meet their navy in English history; we do not read much of Welsh pirates at a time when every seafaring nation took to piracy; and Welshmen were not prominent amongst our early sailors. There is some ground for thinking that the early Britons were fair sailors; there is none for supposing that the Welsh had a navy or ventured upon long voyages in the twelfth century. The tale of Madoc's ship is almost the only naval incident in Welsh arehæology.[2] Of the great naval battle in the Menai Straits we can find no trace in contemporary authorities; it seems as much a figment as Madoc's voyages.[3] It is, then, superfluous to discuss the question whether

  1. They occasionally voyaged to Ireland: vide Brut y Tywysogion: 'Chron. and Memorials of Great Britain,' p. 92, where the voyage of one Owain is noticed. It does not necessarily follow that he went in a Welsh ship, though this is probable. Stephens, Madoc, 209, is against any voyage. He thus sums up: — There is no notice of any naval expedition of the kind in any contemporary historian, though it is incredible that, if the voyage had taken place, it should not have been recorded. Giraldus Cambrensis, who visited Wales in 1188, is silent, though a lover of marvels. The Bardic poems assert that Madoc was slain by an assassin; that Llywarch was suspected of the murder, and that he was put upon his trial for it. Assuming a mysterious death for Madoc, he explains the tradition from analogies in folklore. Pp. 218, 219.
  2. Madoc, 207. Madoc was a great sailor, fond of travel, and built a ship without iron, with stag-horn nails, to enter the vortex that the sea might not swallow her up. He called her the Horn Lady, and voyaged with her to foreign lands. Returning, she was wrecked off Bardsey. The story in its present form dates from the close of the sixteenth century, though we are told that it "had come down from hand to hand under creditable warranty to this day [1582]."
  3. There was a battle, of course; but all that the scanty allusions to it would seem to imply is, that the Welsh stood on the shore and strove to resist the attempted landing of the English soldiers. Cf. Stephens, T., 'Literature of the Kymry,' 17, 18. In Matthew Paris' 'Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain,' vol. v. 633, under the year 1257, and consequently after the English conquest of Wales, there is notice of the Welsh troubling the English with "massacre, fire and rapine." On this Edward threatens them with the naval strength of the Irish: and the Welsh, to resist the Irish at sea, furnished themselves, we are told, with a fleet of galleys, "piraticis armis et victualibus communitas." From this it would appear that they had a fleet before the middle of the thirteenth century. There is in 1212 (Close Rolls,