﻿36 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



and absorbed by the Araucanians. And one of the wildest tribes of 

 the Peruvian mountains is said to be quite certainly in part of 

 European descent (which does not show at all) as a result of a lost 

 white city planted unluckily by a viceroy to overawe them. However, 

 we have no proof of such experience in the case of Madoc's followers. 



Across the ocean there is some little evidence for him; but 

 either late or uncertain. That part of the History of Cambria 

 attributed to Caradog of Llancarvan (died 1152) mentions Madoc 

 in its last paragraph among " Prince Owen Gwynedd's many children 

 by divers women." Certain abbeys brought the work down to the 

 year 1270. A well known English translation of about 1559 by 

 Humphrey Lloyd was afterward edited and extended by D. Powell 

 with great pains, and published in 1584. Both of these modern 

 writers made interpolations, which there was an honest attempt to 

 distinguish by notes and markings ; but they leave the reader uncer- 

 tain as to the actual facts. 



Thus the statement that " Madoc left the land and prepared certain 

 ships and men and munition and sought adventures by seas, sailing 

 west, leaving the coast of Ireland so far north that he came to lands 

 unknown," may be due to some forgotten brother of a monastery ; 

 or to Lloyd the translator nearly five centuries afterward, as the next 

 sentences undoubtedly are. 



Furthermore, when we find Powell quoting from Gutyn Owens, an 

 early writer, to the effect that Madoc left some of his people in the 

 new country when he returned to Wales and that he afterward 

 sailed to rejoin them with ten ships, it is baffling to learn from 

 Stephens that close inquiry fails to supply any original and that the 

 passage is not in the manuscript work to which it most often has 

 been credited. Yet assuming that Powell read it in some lost book 

 of Owens, and even that it be true, we still are not informed where 

 Madoc went. 



Stephens also winnowed and sifted a number of pre-Columbian 

 allusions or supposed allusions to Madoc in Welsh poems ; giving 

 more accurate translations, which offer such unnautical substitutes 

 as " walls " and " fierceness " for the sea-words relied upon. There 

 remains only a small residuum, vaguely celebrating his taste for 

 navigation. We may add Lloyd's reference to certain popular 

 " fables " of Madoc current in the sixteenth century, but a specimen 

 would be more valuable than the translator's easy disparagement. 



Davies, quoted and followed by Stephens, 1 believed that Madoc 

 died in Wales by the hand of an assassin before the year 1170, the 



1 Th. Stephens: Madoc (ed. 1893), p. 212; see also p. 210. 



