A BRITISH SHIP.
After a cut in The Mirror of Literature, etc. (London, 1823), vol. i. p. 177, showing a vessel then recently exhumed in Kent, and supposed to be of the time of Edward I, or the thirteenth century. The vessel was sixty-four feet long.
The renewed interest in the matter seems to have prompted Southey to the writing of his poem Madoc, though he refrained from publishing it for some years. If one may judge from his introductory note, Southey held to the historical basis of the narrative. Meanwhile, reports were published of this and the other tribes being found speaking Welsh.[705] In 1816, Henry Kerr printed at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, his Travels through the Western interior of the United States, 1808-16, with some account of a tribe whose customs are similar to those of the ancient Welsh. In 1824, Yates and Moulton (State of New York) went over the ground rather fully, but without conviction. Hugh Murray (Travels in North America, London, 1829) believes the Welsh went to Spain. In 1834, the different sides of the case were discussed by Farcy and Warden in Dupaix’s Antiquités Méxicaines. Some years later the publication of George Catlin[706] probably gave more conviction than had been before felt,[707] arising from his statements of positive linguistic correspondences in the language of the so-called White[708] Mandans[709] on the Missouri River, the similarity of their boats to the old Welsh coracles, and other parallelisms of custom. He believed that Madoc landed at Florida, or perhaps passed up the Mississippi River. His conclusions were a reinforcement of those reached by Williams.[710] The opinion reached by Major in his edition of Columbus’ Letters (London, 1847) that the Welsh discovery was quite possible, while it was by no means probable, is with little doubt the view most generally accepted to-day; while the most that can be made out of the claim is presented with the latest survey in B. F. Bowen’s America discovered by the Welsh in 1170 a.d. (Philad., 1876). He gathers up, as helping his proposition, such widely scattered evidences as the Lake Superior copper mines and the Newport tower, both of which he appropriates; and while following the discoverers from New England south and west, he does not hesitate to point out the resemblance of the Ohio Valley mounds[711] to those depicted in Pennant’s Tour of Wales; and he even is at no loss for proofs among the relics of the Aztecs.[712]
[H.] The Zeni and their Map.—Something has been said elsewhere (Vol. III. p. 100) of the influence of the Zeni narrative and its map, in confusing Frobisher in his voyages. The map was reproduced in the Ptolemy of 1561, with an account of the adventures of the brothers, but it was so far altered as to dissever Greenland from Norway, of which the Zeni map had made it but an extension.[713]
The story got further currency in Ramusio (1574, vol. ii.), Ortelius (1575), Hakluyt (1600, vol. iii.), Megiser’s Septentrio Novantiquus (1613), Purchas (1625), Pontanus’ Rerum Danicarum (1631), Luke Fox’s North-West Fox (1633), and in De Laet’s Notæ (1644), who, as well as Hornius, De Originibus Americanis (1644), thinks the story suspicious. It was repeated by Montanus in 1671, and by Capel, Vorstellungen des Norden, in 1676. Some of the features of the map had likewise become pretty constant in the attendant cartographical records. But from the close of the seventeenth century for about a hundred years, the story was for the most part ignored, and it was not till 1784 that the interest in it was revived by the publications of Forster[714] and Buache,[715] who each expressed their belief in the story.
A more important inquiry in behalf of the narrative took place at Venice in 1808, when Cardinal Zurla republished the map in an essay, and marked out the track of the Zeni on a modern chart.[716]
In 1810, Malte-Brun accorded his belief in the verity of the narrative, and was inclined to believe that the Latin books found in Estotiland were carried there by colonists from Greenland.[717] A reactionary view was taken by Biddle in his Sebastian Cabot, in 1831, who believed the publication of 1558 a fraud; but the most effective denial of its authenticity came a few years later in sundry essays by Zahrtmann.[718]
RICHARD H. MAJOR.
[After a photograph kindly furnished by himself at the editor’s request.—Ed.]