Some years later (1828-31) W. A. Graah made, by order of the king of Denmark, a thorough examination of the east coast, and in his Undersögelses Reise til Ostkysten af Grönland (Copenhagen, 1832)[692] he was generally thought to establish the great improbability of any traces of a colony ever existing on that coast. Of late years Graah’s conclusions have been questioned, for there have been some sites of buildings discovered on the east side.[693] The Reverend J. Brodbeck, a missionary, described some in The Moravian Quarterly, July and Aug., 1882. Nordenskjöld has held that when the east coast is explored from 65° to 69°, there is a chance of discovering the site of an east colony.[694]
R. H. Major, in a paper (Journal Roy. Geog. Soc., 1873, p. 184) on the site of the lost colony, questioned Graah’s conclusions, and gave a sketch map, in which he placed its site near Cape Farewell; and he based his geographical data largely upon the chorography of Greenland and the sailing directions of Ivan Bardsen, who was probably an Icelander living in Greenland some time in the fifteenth century.[695]
[G.] Madoc and the Welsh.—Respecting the legends of Madoc, there are reports, which Humboldt (Cosmos, Bohn, ii. 610) failed to verify, of Welsh bards rehearsing the story before 1492,[696] and of statements in the early Welsh annals. The original printed source is in Humfrey Lloyd’s History of Cambria, now called Wales, written in the British language [by Caradoc] about 200 years past (London, 1584).[697] The book contained corrections and additions by David Powell, and it was in these that the passages of importance were found, and the supposition was that the land visited lay near the Gulf of Mexico. Richard Hakluyt, in his Principall Navigations, took the story from Powell, and connected the discovery with Mexico in his edition of 1589, and with the West Indies in that of 1600 (iii. p. 1),—and there was not an entire absence of the suspicion that it was worth while to establish some sort of a British claim to antedate the Spanish one established through Columbus.[698]
The linguistic evidences were not brought into prominence till after one Morgan Jones had fallen among the Tuscaroras[699] in 1660, and found, as he asserted, that they could understand his Welsh. He wrote a statement of his experience in 1685-6, which was not printed till 1740.[700]
During the eighteenth century we find Campanius in his Nye Swerige (1702) repeating the story; Torfæus (Hist. Vinlandiæ, 1705) not rejecting it; Carte (England, 1747) thinking it probable; while Campbell (Admirals, 1742), Lyttleton (Henry the Second, 1767), and Robertson (America, 1777) thought there was no ground, at least, for connecting the story with America.
It was reported that in 1764 a man, Griffeth, was taken by the Shawnees to a tribe of Indians who spoke Welsh.[701] In 1768, Charles Beatty published his Journal of a two months’ Tour in America (London), in which he repeated information of Indians speaking Welsh in Pennsylvania and beyond the Mississippi, and of the finding of a Welsh Bible among them.
In 1772-73, David Jones wandered among the tribes west of the Ohio, and in 1774, at Burlington, published his Journal of two visits, in which he enumerates the correspondence of words which he found in their tongues with his native Welsh.[702]
Without noting other casual mentions, some of which will be found in Paul Barron Watson’s bibliography (in Anderson’s America not discovered by Columbus, p. 142), it is enough to say that towards the end of the century the papers of John Williams[703] and George Burder[704] gave more special examination to the subject than had been applied before.
