“GOD ne’er brings to pass such Things for nought”: Empire and Prince Madoc of Wales in Eighteenth-Century America

In 1734, a poem titled “Upon Prince Madoc’s Expedition to the Country now called America, in the 12^th Century” appeared in the Philadelphia-based American Weekly Mercury. According to the legend from which the poem takes its subject, in the year 1170 A.D., Madoc, the youngest son of Welsh ruler Owain Gwynnedd, left his homeland to escape the feuding of his power-hungry brothers after the death of their father. Madoc sailed west from Wales across the great ocean until he reached what is now known as North America. Finding there fertile soil and a region promising for settlement, he sailed back to Wales, enthusiastically told his friends and family of his discovery, and, along with a significant number of these people, returned over the ocean to his New World. There they established themselves as a thriving community which, over the years, drifted farther into the interior of the continent and successfully perpetuated itself.

Scant as may be any evidence verifying the Madoc legend, the heroic Welshman and his descendants, who came to be distinguished by either speaking Welsh or being of a whiter skin hue than other Indians, maintained a powerful hold over the imaginations of many Anglo-Americans for several centuries. In this essay, I examine how “Upon Prince Madoc’s Expedition” uses the legend to legitimate empire through imagining a past that clearly justifies and exemplifies a successful process of empire-building in North America. The poem depicts Madoc’s feat as the primeval American journey, or the journey that put into motion the British territorialization of the continent. More than initiating the colonization and westernization of the New World by one trailblazing Welshman, the poem presents Madoc’s journey as primeval in that the journey is the root of British-American identity and activity in North America, the root of Britain’s successful geographical expansion into North America and establishment of British cultural hegemony therein. The qualities exhibited by Madoc during his journey and his accomplishments in America are elemental to the value system, character traits, and imperial designs of eighteenth-century British subjects in America and Britain.

In actuality, little is known of the historical figure of Prince Madoc, as the different and variable components of the legend suggest. Through written records, scholars can rely on the fact of his existence in Wales toward the end of the twelfth century, but no indisputable facts exist to prove as true or false the legend of his voyage to North America. Arthur Davies dismisses the idea of Madoc reaching what is now the United States, but convincingly proposes that “Madoc probably sailed far north and west with knowledge of the sea-trade which was then active between Greenland colonies and the peoples of Western Europe” and demonstrates that “two strange reports connected with the Arthurian legend support Greenland as the probable location of Madoc’s colonists” (364–65). In a statement that concurs with what Davies finds, Robert R. Rea writes, “The existence of a seagoing Madoc may be accepted without undue strain, but his successful and repeated crossings of the Atlantic are quite another matter” (15). Nevertheless, the inability to disprove the story of Madoc’s voyages has surely helped the legend to endure through the years. Furthermore, even if he really did make the transatlantic journey to America (more than once, according to some accounts), no concrete evidence exists to reveal what became of Madoc and his settlers once there, only vague clues about white Indians shrouded in centuries of folklore and secondhand accounts of encounters with the descendents of Madoc’s people.

This vacuum of material evidence regarding Madoc the historical figure is an asset for Madoc the legendary figure. Michael Warner writes that “cultural historians have a long-standing fondness for themes of wilderness, land, nature, settlement, and civilization in early Anglo-America. How would these themes be transformed if viewed as part of a complex but in important ways colonialist process of territorialization?” (55). He specifically challenges scholars to ask this question of...