Three travelers who do qualify, if curiously, as real explorers are a churchman, a prince, and an English sailor. The first two narratives are quite unproven, might end in the Gulf of Mexico, and are believed by many. The third, a castaway, almost certainly walked across Texas.

Nova typis frontispiece with St. Brandon to the left Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-109

The first is St. Brendan, an Irish man of the church born at Tralee around 490. He had a busy life filled with activities of the faith and is also known for one or more voyages into the Atlantic. Most of the activities of Brendan’s life—founding monasteries, for example—are believed without question as given in ninth, tenth, and eleventh century records. And in most of these cases, secondary evidence is available. However, Brendan’s Atlantic voyages are questioned rather closely.

The most liberal interpretation of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, a Latin manuscript work of about 800-1000, is that it records one or more voyages which took Brendan through the North Atlantic from the Arctic to the Caribbean. (1)

One might at first question why an early Irish priest would sail the Atlantic. Ireland, in the centuries after the removal of the Roman government from England, for a time became a land of renowned learning and dynamic Christianity. Even so, many an Irish churchman felt the desire for isolation—a need for a place secure from secular influences where one could meditate in peace, pray, endure hardships in partial atonement for sin, and perhaps retire. The rocky islands off the north coast of Britain served this purpose, as did Iceland and possibly Greenland. The Norse not only had legends that the Irish preceded them to northern islands but also gave accounts of continually finding Irish priests in the most isolated and unlikely places. (2)

That the voyages west were possible is clear. (3) The Irish had boats made of ox hides, oak-bark tanned, oiled with wool grease, and stretched over wooden frames. These were very seaworthy and capable of carrying up to twenty people. How early they used wooden boats is unknown.

An alleged incident from Brendan's voyage Institute of Texan Cultures, 84-111

In any case, the Irish did to some degree sail the Atlantic and did to a great degree inject a mix of geographical references into European literature from the sixth century on. (4) These stories, like any heroic tales, tend to congregate around leading characters, no matter who actually did what. Most of the stories of voyages gathered around St. Brendan—who was soon known as “the Navigator”—and became part of his quest westward for an Earthly Paradise. His story is a collection of the best parts of all that is remembered about early voyages, Irish and otherwise, stuck together into an only occasionally incoherent narrative.

Specific details are plentiful. Brendan, for at least one voyage, used a wooden boat capable of carrying sixty people (far in advance of any other evidence of wooden boats in Ireland). He sailed beyond the known bounds of a large ocean and described events, islands, and lands which range from the probable to the fantastic.

The most interesting details come from a voyage ascribed to about 550. Brendan sails to well-known and easily identified places, such as the Faeroes. He describes sheep which, according to other records, were in fact introduced there but not until many generations after Brendan. The compiler of the story evidently included facts from times well after the life of Brendan. The Navigatio may be thought of as a compendium of maritime knowledge from someone writing in the year 950.

Other places allegedly visited by Brendan included islands and lands in a tropical setting which sounds like the Caribbean. He describes exotic fruits, beautiful islands, and clear seas such as are in the Bahamas or along the western Florida coast. (5) In passing to these places, and on his return, Brendan rather poetically describes what could be the Sargasso Sea, icebergs, and the volcanoes of Iceland.

During his journey Brendan notes that, at one landing, he took a forty-day expedition into the heart of the country. The number is suspiciously Biblical, but the land seems to be an ordinary continent. Later commentators claim he found the Earthly Paradise.

The finding of the Earthly Paradise, original home of Adam and Eve, was not taken lightly for centuries. Such a story would have been added to the tales of Brendan. Columbus, many centuries later, held in part the same desire, naming a South American river the Gihon (from Genesis II, 13) and saying he thought that South America might include the Paradise. Both Brendan and Columbus, among all educated people, knew the earth was spherical but also surmised that a journey west might lead to other things than spices. A way west might lead to the Far East, but it might also lead to the fading dream of a paradise on earth. (6)

In the case of Brendan, there is no secondary evidence from the Americas that he arrived. The only possible interest is that his stories exist at least in legend, and they parallel others such as the Greek story about the land of the satyrs. Taken together, such stories seem to say that either somebody had been sailing around the New World rather early or that several writers had vivid and parallel imaginations.

Other stories do exist. Norse sagas tell the story of the Irishman Ari Marson who was driven by storms across the Atlantic in 983 (about three years before the Norse themselves) to a land where he was baptized by Christians who had preceded him. But no other evidence exists for this journey, although one can speculate what motives the Norsemen might have had for telling the story. (7) Most of the tales, wherever they come from, point to a route west, into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, as logical ends of a European voyage.

A prince is said to have made that voyage five hundred years after Brendan—on very slightly more evidence. The man was Welsh, by the name of Madoc (Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd, and in 1170 he may have found what was to become North America. For years a mild controversy has been maintained as to whether Madoc sailed to America and perhaps the Gulf of Mexico in the twelfth century. (8) There is some evidence that he may have done so, or at least tried. (9) There is no evidence that allows absolute proof.

Legendary Welsh dragon

Madoc was apparently a real Welshman but perhaps never a prince, although called so in later days. Madoc was a son of Owain Gwynedde (Owen Gwyneth), a Prince of North Wales, in an indeterminate line of succession. His father had numerous children, including many sons, whom even historians despair of unraveling but simply note that he “left behind him many children gotten by diverse women.” (10) These children (more than twenty) naturally quarreled over the succession, and Madoc thought it best to leave the land “in contention betwixt his bretheren” and go elsewhere by “sailing West.”

Whatever the original story, like St. Brendan’s it became considerably embroidered as the centuries went by. Perhaps unfortunately for Madoc and his reputation, the story was seized upon by both over-zealous Welsh chauvinists and Welsh detractors. Madoc became a legendary figure around whom revolved a collection of stories related to voyages west, most sounding a little too much like the imaginings of a poet.

Robert Southy—taking his background information from the bard Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1740-1826), who apparently made up most of his Madoc material, and Dr. Owen-Pughe, who did stick to probable fact amidst a host of inaccurate, romantic references—took Madoc not only to the Americas but also into an Aztec sacrifice. Madoc happily escaped, but his reputation has been damaged ever since. (11)

Some records attesting to a journey are well known and supported by other Welsh history. Madoc, after a family dispute, made a voyage of exploration to an unknown land and found it to his liking. He returned and collected a small colony of Welsh, “such men and women as were desirous to live in quietness,” and took them to the west across the sea. (12) Just where Madoc established this colony is what remains in dispute. That he did in fact leave Wales is not usually questioned.

In 1584 David Powel compiled and wrote his Historie of Cambria, which collected much Welsh history, including the Madoc stories. Powel, dealing with old manuscripts and oral stories, noted that the “common people” were wont to augment rather than to diminish tall tales. This had happened to Madoc, but Powel’s opinion of the prince’s presence in the west was that “sure it is, that there he was.” (13) Powel found few details about the voyage, but he concluded that Madoc journeyed far south of Ireland and—in two voyages—settled a land that was part of New Spain or Florida. Powel’s opinion was that the Welshman went to “some part of Mexico.” (14)

Later writers there are who believe Madoc’s voyage, but they have found no other evidence than Powel. Their belief is not additional evidence. Richard Hakluyt, in his Principall Navigations, expressed the theory that Madoc had sailed at least to the West Indies or some other part of New Spain. (15) He does note that there may have been elements of Christianity in native beliefs before the Spanish arrived. (16)

Many of those who later remarked on Madoc’s story also thought that the Gulf of Mexico was perhaps the end of the voyage or voyages. Part of the claim of Sir George Peckham, in his efforts to prove that England had an inherent right to much of the Americas, was that Madoc had sailed to the lands later called New Spain. Sir George, and perhaps even Powel, may have had political motives for emphasizing England at the expense of Spain (even by using a Welsh prince).

Nevertheless, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a marker at Mobile Bay, Alabama, as the place of Madoc’s landing. The marker depends not so much on a known place of landing as on the curious stories of Welsh-speaking Native Americans north of there at one time. This unlikely occurrence has a long background and involves an Englishman who may have walked across Texas more than four hundred years ago.

Sir John Hawkins Institute of Texan Cultures, 80-550

David Ingram was an English sailor who, along with one hundred fourteen others, was set ashore north of Tampico in 1568. Ingram had been with a fleet headed by Captain John Hawkins, who was trading but also teaching Francis Drake about the profits of pirating against the Spanish. Drake, later Sir Francis, learned well, but that is a different story.

Their small fleet of six English ships had stopped in Africa for slaves to help increase the profits of the trip, and all had gone well at first. The cargo had been illegally sold to the Spanish in the New World at handsome profit, and the English had turned their attention to what Spanish ships they might plunder. Theirs was a curious business.

The defeat of the British under Sir John Hawkins at San Juan de Ulloa, port of Veracruz Institute of Texan Cultures, 74-1068

Caught by a sudden storm, the English fleet had little choice but to seek refuge in the Spanish port of Veracruz. (17) Their bad luck was just starting, for an unexpected Spanish fleet trapped them there. Four of the English ships were sunk, and two managed to escape.

Francis Drake sailed the Judith out of the harbor and back to England as fast as he could. Hawkins’s ship, the Minion, had taken on board most of the survivors from the other ships and, although it managed to clear the harbor, was so crowded that the men realized a run for England was impossible. “They very well sawe, that . . . if they perished not by drowning, yet hunger would force them in the ende to eate one another.” (18)

Cannibalism the English would not consider. More than a hundred men elected to take their chances ashore. Many walked back south to be captured by the Spanish; the rest went north. Only three of the latter survived: David Ingram, Richard Browne, and Richard Twide. They walked across Texas and on east to the Atlantic where they were eventually picked up by a French ship and returned to England.

Ingram published his account, one of the first descriptions of the New World for English readers, some years later in Hakluyt’s collection of voyages. Of note were his remarks concerning the use of Welsh by some of the natives he met. One bird, similar to a goose, bore a name curiously like “penguin” which to Ingram “seemeth to be a Welsh name.” “And they have,” Ingram continued, “also in use divers other Welsh words, a matter worthy the noting.” (19)

Indeed, such a thing was worth noting, and people did so for the next three hundred years. Sir Walter Raleigh made the same observation, (20) followed by many others. One of the clearest reports in later years was that of Governor John Sevier of Tennessee about an Indian chief who recalled stories of the Welsh arrival in America (and a landing near Mobile Bay) and of traders who spoke Welsh with various groups of Indians of North America. The stories were common through the end of the nineteenth century. (21)

A great amount of information was eventually gathered to support the fact that some Native Americans, perhaps the Mandans, were of Welsh descent and spoke a form of Welsh. (22) A number of people attested that this was so, and a few speculated that the speakers were the end of Madoc’s colony, nearly assimilated. But no recordings were made, no transcripts were gathered by trained linguists in the field, and the language—if it ever existed in America among natives—does not exist today.

The initial page of Ingram's account shows the ambiguity of the place of the landing. "Florida" included Texas at the time. The distance in leagues northwest is (perhaps) incorrect, the distance traveled is (perhaps) correct, to place the landing in the western Gulf of Mexico. Institute of Texan Cultures, 68-2456

The evidence for Ingram’s walk, and Hawkins’s voyage, for that matter, is not questioned today, even though the main documentary difference between it and Madoc’s presumed voyage is slight. Certainly a small quantity of Spanish and English government record does corroborate the incidents. But Ingram’s walk itself was so questioned for a time that the narrative was removed from a later edition of Hakluyt. (23)

Whether New Spain or Mexico or somewhere else in North America was the end of Madoc’s voyage—or whether it really happened—will probably never be known. There is simply not enough evidence to constitute proof.

The only fact that exists is the legend itself. Madoc’s return from somewhere, after an initial voyage of exploration, with stories of a land across the sea, did become legend in Europe. By all accounts, at least, he never returned from a second voyage. Whether his adventures became legend in the Americas as well is not clear.

Early stories among some North American Indians about a group of people coming from the east over the sea have been recorded, but the telling of the stories has apparently died out. The Aztecs had the legend of Quetzalcoatl, in one form a white man who came from the east. Partly because of this legend (and a great number of native allies), Cortés found the conquest of Mexico at first relatively easy. Zealous supporters of Madoc see the adventurous Welshman in the stories of this Quetzalcoatl; detractors see only coincidence in the stories of a white man arriving from the east into the Gulf of Mexico.

Which proves that legends are hard to prove.