The captain further observed, that Don Juan de Grijalva, a Spaniard, said that "he found the Celts of Mexico, some having little or no arms, but clothed in hides; and that the fierceness of their manners and their undaunted courage resembled the old Britons, as described by Henry II. to the Emperor Emmanuel Commenes. He also found others with short-skirted vests of different colors, with targets and short black spears, and that these new men in Mexico were adored by the natives for their courage and dexterity, for that they never had seen ships till they came among them from afar."
Antonio Goluasco, a Portuguese author of great celebrity, mentions the expedition of a Captain Machan, a British adventurer, in 1344, who had been in Mexico, and had got store of wealth and silver from the native sovereign of that day, but who was cast away on his return to Europe, with all his treasure, near Madeira.
Also, from the negotiations of Sir John Hawkins, an English admiral, in the latter part of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and from the speeches of various Mexican chiefs to Sir John's officers who were sent from Vera Cruz to Mexico to negotiate with the Spanish Viceroy, is deduced strong proof that these chiefs looked upon themselves as descended from the Welsh.
The Tlascalans belonged to the same great family with the Aztecs. They came on the grand Mexican plateau about the same time with the kindred races, at the close of the twelfth century. Their immense fortifications and walls, which extended for many miles, show the same methods of construction, in semicircular lines and overlapping one another, as those in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi.
Most of the historians say that the two great pyramids—teocalli—just northeast of the city of Mexico were constructed by an ancient people that came to Mexico from some country east situated on the Atlantic Ocean.
What, then, is the conclusion? That the Aztecs were the Alligewi, who were found in Virginia and the Carolinas by Madoc's colony, and with whom the latter became amalgamated and moved westward. Being more and more pressed by the powerful Indian nations which subsequently gained control of the middle and eastern countries, they were at length obliged to abandon the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Some portions of these people had reached, as a sort of advance-guard, the Mexican plateau before those who were left behind entirely surrendered the country. The date of founding the Aztec empire—1325—necessitates this view, and Clavigero, whose table of dates has been given in another part of this chapter, places the first arrival of the Aztecs in Tula as early as 1196,—twenty-six years after the arrival of Madoc.
When this mighty migration took place, a portion, from necessity, convenience, or inclination, ascended the Missouri; and of these the Mandans are the descendants; while the main body moved in a southwest direction, leaving unmistakable traces of their progress from the Mississippi to Mexico. Some of these will be noticed in a subsequent chapter.
The Aztec empire became a controlling power on this continent, and exacted tribute for the Mexican kings from all the Indian tribes. But the Welsh element was no more in point of numbers, though they were in power, to the Aztecs than the Tartars were to the Chinese. The ships which are represented on Mexican monuments as crossing an ocean are Madoc's vessels, floating on the Atlantic from Wales to America.
Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, the most profound investigator in Mexican and Peruvian antiquities, says, "The native traditions generally attribute their civilization to bearded white men, who came across the ocean from the east."