ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The emergence of this book has been dependent on an army of friends and family.

Empowered by the enthusiasm and advice of Nemonie Craven Roderick, a literary agent at Jonathan Clowes who bravely thought the proposed book was a rational idea, I set about arranging an investigative concert tour of North America with the aid of Eric Dimenstein in New York City’s DUMBO district under the Man-hattan Bridge. Never did he flinch at its possibly whimsical nature. Thanks also to Nicole Roeder and all the staff at Ground Control Touring. On that tour and film adventure, many of the interviews that were transcribed into this book were arranged by Catryn Ramasut and Kelly Pickard, both of whom were instrumental in the logistics, as was the legend of the frontier Joe Puleo, who had the greatest number of sleepless nights and the hardest trucking routes. I’m forever indebted to him for my appreciation of the joys of American coffee and frozen custard (consumed separately). Dylan Goch, who directed the film of this book, came to the rescue of many slow (speaking for myself) interviews by placing considered questions to the interviewee that often led to more revealing answers than I could ever fish out and which provided a great resource for this book.

Haydn Jones and Menna Jones at Antur Waunfawr gave me great assistance in providing copies of documents relating to John Evans when they had much more important things to be doing.

This is also true of my family: my brother Dafydd turned me on in particular to the work of W. Raymond Wood, and his own essay on John Evans, ‘The Geographical Consequences of Welsh Indians’, contains some of the profoundest insights into Evans’s legacy that have been written. His guidance was crucial, as was the generosity of my sister, Non, and mother, Margaret, in sharing details and documents of our familial link with Evans. As to all the other living relatives of John Evans, I hope this book brings neither heavy burden nor distress, and my sincerest apologies if I seem to have misrepresented any aspect of his memory in any way.

My huge thanks to Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton for his enthusiasm in sharing this story and for guiding me through the mysterious process of producing a book, and also to the expertise and rigour of the copy-editor, Caroline Pretty, Janette Revill’s text design, Rachael Tremlett’s shaped poems, Paul Nicholas’s map of John Evans’s journey to the American Interior, and the excitement and support of Anna Kelly, Ellie Smith, Nathan Hull and Matt Clacher.

One of my biggest thank-yous is to all the interviewees, most of whom have left a lasting impression on me. I hope my depictions of you are not too painful. This book would be half its size without you. A great big thanks to Edwin Benson, Marilin Hudson, Calvin Grinell and Keith Bear, too, for opening doors at the Fort Berthold Reservation, and to the great generosity of Cory Spotted Bear at Twin Buttes, whose blankets and coats keep us warm here in Wales. Likewise to Dennis Hastings, Margery Coffee and Richard for their warm welcome in the Omaha Reservation. An extra thank-you to the mayor of Rio Grande, for his incredible hospitality and the mobilization of the police force!

The historical aspects of this book are largely dependent on the previous scholarly acrobatics of the Welsh historian David Williams, his American counterpart A. P. Nasatir, and their academic heirs on both sides of the Atlantic: Gwyn A. Williams and W. Raymond Wood. Beyond my insights as a relative, and an advantage in reading Welsh-language papers and some minor discoveries in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, I have unearthed very little new academic material on John Evans, as the documents concerning his story have already been pored over and analysed thoroughly by the professional historians mentioned. This has, however, been an opportunity for me to compile and update the story so far. And as W. Raymond Wood told me, some things need repetition to survive. I would like to thank him for coming to see the show and for his time in Columbia, and also to acknowledge in lieu of a bibliography that the diplomatic flurry of letters between Evans and the Canadian traders were reproduced from his compilation of documents in his book Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition (2003). I also rely on Wood’s book, in many cases, for my quotation from journals and letters. Wood cites A. P. Nasatir’s Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785–1804 (1952) as his own source in many cases, and I too have relied on Nasatir’s scholarship. In the case of the documents from the hands of Truteau and Gayoso de Lemos, I cite translations from Before Lewis and Clark that were likely made by Annie Heloise Abel and Nasatir himself, respectively. I refer to the journals of Lewis and Clark as edited by Bernard DeVoto (1953). I have occasionally amended sources. Statistics and history relating to the Omaha tribe were collated thanks to The Omaha Tribe Historical Research Project. All documents are printed as originally written.

I would also like to thank Alun Llwyd and Kevin Tame from Turnstile Music for coordinating the investigative concert tour, the recording and everything in between.

I would like to thank Huw Evans, Cate Timothy, Alan Lane and Gill Boden for letting me write at their homes, and for babysitting, as did Tamsin, Steve, Noi and Arlene. But mostly I would like to thank and dedicate this book to Catryn, Mali Mai and Mabli.

I would also like to thank the following: Pete Fowler for the beautiful title font of this book and the cover itself; Louise Evans for making the avatar of John Evans from Pete’s design; Kliph Scurlock, Doug McKinney and Jessica Wisneski; Ryan Owen Eddleston was very much part of the making of this book, as was Dom Corbisiero, who recorded the interviews; Nate Krenkel, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis for demystifying Omaha; and thanks to Siôn Glyn for the books. How could I not thank Steve Rajewski and Brett Padget for the fantastic drives on the trail of Evans, and Jon Savage for providing the soundtracks to those drives as well as John Evans’s astrological details. Many thanks to all the kind people at the Beinecke library, Yale, for their help with this project and also for the pizza. Thanks also to Dafydd Ieuan, Huw Bunford, Cian Ciaran, Guto Pryce, Rhodri Puw, Dewi Emlyn for previous American adventures, and to the memory of Les Morrison whose enthusiasm formed lasting friendships on that great continent.

LETTER FROM JOHN EVANS
TO SAMUEL JONES

TRADE! THE AMERICAN TURN-ON

Featuring a limited guide to the lost realm
of Spanish Louisiana (from the perspective of
a twenty-first-century night-club singer)

There were multiple layers of sovereignty in eighteenth-century North America.

At the conclusion of the American leg of the Seven Years War in 1763 (in which France, allied with multiple tribes, fought the British) the French exited the continent as a colonial power. And in 1764, after the Treaty of Paris, they formally handed over Louisiana to the Spanish. The Spanish in turn handed over their lands east of the Mississippi to the British (in return for the repossession of Havana). This suited the Spanish well, as they wanted to protect the cultivated lands of Mexico from other European colonists by any means, and Louisiana, stretching from its capital at New Orleans up to the Canadian border and west to the Rockies, acted as a gigantic buffer zone. Also, although Louisiana was known as New Spain, its northern region, centred on the emergent city of St Louis, actually retained French as its main language.

Of course, after the American Revolution and the eventual American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the British were left in control of only the Canadian lands to the north, but however much the colonial powers liked to carve up the carcass of the Americas arbitrarily, the reality on the ground was that the indigenous tribes were still in charge of large areas of this rapidly changing wilderness, and indeed individual tribes enforced effective trade blockades on rivers such as the Missouri. By and large, the colonial and US governments accepted this fact, and on paper at least the tribes were designated control of vast areas of their ancient homelands where they could continue to hunt and live freely (that these treaties were broken by aggressive expansion is testament to the outlaw reality of the West).

In this era, therefore, when the colonists talked of borders it was in the main of borders concerning trading rights rather than those of sovereign, European-style states. Initially Spain had a blasé attitude to the buffer state of Louisiana; indeed, it had no concrete idea of its size even. But when the British Canadians established trading forts up north at the Mandan villages and along strategic areas of the Missouri River, well within the trading border of Spanish Louisiana in the 1790s, this sent alarm bells ringing all the way to New Orleans, as it could lead not only to an eventual British threat to Mexican lands in the south but also to an end to Spanish dominance of the Missouri fur trade, not to mention shutting off the long-promised north-west passage to the Pacific and trade dominance of the entire continent.

This is why the Mackay–Evans expedition was of such significance to the Spanish government in New Orleans, and why it initially sponsored this otherwise privately funded Missouri Company trading venture. Trade, often based on existing Native American trading routes, was synonymous with power. John Evans’s pioneering cartography of the Missouri basin and his capture of the British Canadian fort at the Mandan villages was hugely important to the balance of trading and political power in the region. Within seven years, Spain, sick of the expense of trying to tame the Giant Louisiana Beast, swapped it with France for lands in Europe. New Spain was dead at forty years old. Louisiana was handed back to the French, who sold it immediately to the US for fifteen million dollars, still considered to be one of the best land deals in history. Spain was happy as long as there was a continuing buffer zone between the British in the north and Mexico in the south; it was all the better if they didn’t have to maintain it themselves.

In 1804, when the US government’s Lewis and Clark expedition followed Evans’s 1795–6 Missouri journey, its remit was trade expansion as much as it was discovery. Evans seemingly knew full well the future political significance of repelling British trading interest in the major waterways of the Missouri and Mississippi basin, as it would more than likely facilitate the momentum of US expansion, and with it, or so Evans no doubt hoped, the libertarian values of the American Revolution. Given its prominence in its formative years, it’s hardly a surprise that trade became the dominant aspect of American life, on occasion at the expense of liberty itself.

MACKAY’S INSTRUCTIONS
TO JOHN EVANS

Instructions, given to Jean Evans for crossing the continent in order to discover a passage from the sources of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, following the orders of the Director of the company, Don St Yago Clamorgan under the protection of his Excellency Mgr de Baron de Carondelet, Governor-General of the Province of Louisiana, and Mr Zenon Trudeau, Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Illinois.

During the time of your absence from this place and during your journey to reach the Pacific or any other place, you will observe the following instructions:

Art. 1

From the time of your departure from this fort until your return to the place where I will be living on the Missouri, you will keep a journal of each day and month of the year to avoid any error in the observations of the important journey which you are undertaking. In your journal you will place all that will be remarkable in the country that you will traverse; likewise the route, distance, latitude and longitude, when you observe it, also the winds and weather. You will also keep another journal in which you will make note of all the minerals; vegetables; timber; rocks; flint-stone; territory; production; animals; game; reptiles; lakes; rivers; mountains; portages, with their extent and location; and the different fish and shellfish which the waters may contain. You will insert in the same journal all that may be remarkable and interesting, particularly the different nations; their numbers, manners, customs, government, sentiments, language, religion and all other circumstances relative to their manner of living.

Art. 2

You will take care to mark down your route and distance each day, whether by land or water; in case you will be short of ink, use the powder, and for want of powder, in the summer you will surely find some fruit whose juice can replace both.

Art. 3

In your route from here to the home of the Ponca, trace out as exactly as possible a general route and distance from the Missouri as well as the rivers which fall into it; and although you cannot take the direction of each turn and current of the Missouri, since you go by land, you can mark the general course of the mountains which will be parallel to each bank. You will observe the same thing for every other river [landmark] which you may see during your journey, whether river, lake, ocean or chain of mountains which may effect your observations.

Art. 4

Be very accurate in your observations concerning the nations, their size, their dwellings, their land and their production.

Art. 5

Mr Truteau, our private agent, whom you will find among the Ricara or Mandanes, will give you what you are bound to need. You will consult with him on the most practical route and he will give you guides that he will obtain from the nations where he will be.

Art. 6

You will take for provisions on your route some well-skinned dried meat, which is very nourishing and a very little quantity of which satisfies your appetite as well as your fancy. Always lay up some provisions and keep them for a last resource.

Art. 7

You will take heed not to fall in with some parties of savages, where there are neither women nor children, as they are almost always on the warpath. It would not be prudent to appear at any nation if you can avoid it, unless it be in their villages; and in spite of this be well on your guard. You will never fire any guns except in case of necessity; you will never cut wood except with a knife unless it should be strictly necessary; you will never build a fire without a true need, and you will avoid having the smoke seen from afar, camping if it is possible in the valleys. You will not camp too early and will always leave before daybreak; you will always be on guard against ambushes and will always have your arms in good condition, changing the tinder evening and morning, and you will never separate them from you or place them in the hands of the savages. When you will see some nations, raise your flag a long way off as a sign of peace, and never approach without speaking to them from a distance. When you will enter a village, stop and ground arms at a small distance until they come to receive and conduct you. Appear always on guard and never be fearful or timid, for the savages are not generally bold, but will act in a manner to make you afraid of them. If, however, they see that you are courageous and venturesome they will soon yield to your wishes. You will recollect that the pipe is the symbol of peace and that when they have smoked with you there is no longer any danger; nevertheless you must beware of treason.

On all occasions be reserved with your detachment as well as with the savages; always give to your conduct the air of importance and show good will towards everyone, white or red.

You will carry with you some merchandise, consisting of various small articles suitable for new nations, in order to make presents to the savages which you will discover; but you must be careful of your generosity in this even as in all other things which you carry and bring with you, seeing that the time of your return is uncertain.

Say to the savages whom you will meet on your route that the white people, who come to meet them, speaking of our Company, still have many other kinds of merchandise for them. If they wish to trap some beaver and otter in order to give the skins in exchange for whatever they need, then it is necessary to show them the process of stretching and cleaning them in the same way as all other kinds of peltry are treated.

If you discover some animals which are unknown to us, you will see that you procure some of this kind, alive if possible. There is, they say, on the long chain of the Rockies which you will cross to go to the Pacific Ocean, an animal which has only one horn on its forehead. Be very particular in the description which you will make of it if you will be unable to procure one of this kind.

When you will have crossed the sources of the Missouri and will have gone beyond the Rockies, you will keep as far as possible within the bounds of the 40th degree of north latitude until you will find yourself nearly within the 111th to 112th degree of longitude west meridian of London. Then you will take a northerly direction to the 42nd degree of latitude, always keeping the same longitude in order to avoid the waters, which probably are destined to fall in California. This might induce you to take a route away from the Pacific Ocean. After all, you cannot travel over so great an expanse of land without finding some nations which can inform you about rivers which go towards the setting sun. Then you will build some canoes to descend these rivers, and will watch carefully since there may be some waterfalls on them which can carry you away, since the distance in longitude from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean ought not to be above 290 leagues, perhaps less, which condition makes it necessary for the rivers to be very rapid or else to have great falls, in comparison with the distance which exists between the sources of the Missouri, which runs over a space of about 1,000 leagues to come to the sea by entering the Mississippi, whose waters are very violent. This is so if it is true that this chain of mountains serves to divide the waters of the west from those of the east.

Mark your route in all places where there will be a portage to pass from one river to another or from one waterfall to another by cutting or notching some trees or by some piles of stones engraved and cut; and take care to place in large letters Charles IV King of Spain and below [that] Company of the Missouri, the day, the month and the year when you do this in order to serve as unquestionable proof of the journey that you are going to make.

There is on the coast of the Pacific Ocean a Russian Settlement that they say is to the north of California, but there is reason to believe that it is not the only one and that the nations of the interior of the continent ought to have knowledge of it. Then, when you will have discovered the places that they inhabit, you will cease to make any sign of taking possession, for fear of having spring up with these foreigners any jealousy which would be prejudicial to the success of your journey. You will not neglect any interesting observation on the seashore and, although there may be some things which do not appear to merit the least attention, nevertheless, in a journey of this nature, everything is sometimes of great importance. Do not fail to measure the risk of the sea in its ebb and flow.

As soon as you will have visited the seashore sufficiently, you will return from it immediately, with as much vigilance as you can, to the place or to the spot where I may be at the time, either among the Mandanes or elsewhere. You will take steps to return by a different route from that which you have taken on your way out if you believe it practical; but mind that if you find the route by which you will have passed rather straight and easy for travelling by water in a canoe or other craft, it will be wiser to return by the same route, and, in case there are portages to make from one river to another or from one rapids to another, see whether the place permits the forming of a settlement.

If, however, you are obliged to search for a new passage to return here from the seashore, you will return from any latitude where you may be when you will take your point of departure to forty-five degrees north latitude; and on your entire route you will examine the most penetrable and practicable places for foreigners to the north country in order to give an account of the means of forming a settlement and fort there to prevent their communication [coming into this territory].

On your journey you will not forget to tell every nation that you discover that their great father, Spain, who is protector of all the white and red men, has sent you to tell them that he has heard of them and their needs and that, desiring to make them happy, he wishes to open a communication to them in order to secure [provide] for them their necessities; that for this purpose it is necessary that all the redskins be peaceful in order that the whites can come to see them; and that, instead of making war, it is better that they should slaughter game with which to feed their women and children.

In your orders be strict with your detachment and take care that no offence is committed against the nations through which you pass, especially by the connection that they may seek to have with the women, a thing which is ordinarily the origin of dissatisfaction and discord with the savages.

Whereas the journey is of very great importance not only to His Catholic Majesty, his subjects and the Company especially, but even [also] to the universe since it ought to open a communication of intercourse through this continent, it requires the clearest evidence to prove the truth of everything and to leave no doubt about the boldness of this discovery.

Take care, above all, to bring with you a collection of the products of the seashore: animals, vegetables, minerals and other curious things that you can find, especially some skirts of sea otters and other sea animals and shellfish which cannot be found in any fresh water. A portion of each will be an unquestionable proof of your journey to the seashore; but, if you can find there any civilized people who wish to give you an affidavit of your journey in whatever language they speak, this will be an additional proof of the validity of your journey.

If on your return, God has disposed of me or I have left the place of my residence on the Missouri, you will not deliver or show to anyone anything relative to your discoveries, but you will go immediately to St Louis to deliver all your papers, plans, charts and journals to Monsieur Clamorgan, Director of the Company. In case he is dead or absent, you will deliver them to whoever will represent him at the time, but in the presence of Monsieur Zenon Trudeau, Lieutenant-Governor, or any other who should represent him, keeping in your possession a copy of each thing to be delivered and sent to the said Monsieur Zenon Trudeau by a safe means; this always in case Messieurs Zenon and Clamorgan should be dead or absent.

(Signed) Mackay
Fort Charles, 28 January 1796

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gruff Rhys is known around the world for his work as a solo artist as well as singer and songwriter with Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon, and for his collaborations with Gorillaz, Mogwai, Dangermouse and Sparklehorse amongst others. The latest album by Neon Neon, Praxis Makes Perfect, based on the life of radical Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, was recently performed as an immersive live concert with National Theatre Wales.

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

JOHN EVANS

A humble orphaned farmhand from Snowdonia, Wales. At twenty-one, with dreams larger than his pockets and wider than the Atlantic Ocean, he leaves his mountain dwelling to go and track down the lost tribe of the Madogwys.

MADOG

Legendary superhero Welsh prince who, it has been told, discovered America in 1170. His descendants are thought to be the tribe of Welsh-speaking Native American Madogwys who (possibly) still roam the Great Plains of America.

DAFYDD DDU ERYRI

(Black David of Snowdonia) Great poet, and mentor and teacher to the young John Evans, he introduces Evans to the tale of Madog and to Iolo Morganwg.

IOLO MORGANWG

A literary prankster, revolutionary and Druid. His magnetism pulls Evans into the fast circle of the London Welsh diaspora, from which he is launched to North America to find the lost grail of the Welsh empire.

PETE FOWLER AND THE FELT MISTRESS

A double act who dare to pluck Evans from the quicksand of time and rebuild him for a new age.

VIG VACATION

Present-day travel operator and concert promoter at the arts and entertainment booking agency WheredoUwannago.com in New York.

GWYN ‘ALF’ WILLIAMS

Popular historian and scholar of Madog and Evans, he once lived on the same street as your host:

GRUFF RHYS

A songwriter and musician, descended from John Evans’s maternal uncle, I am searching for the remains of my distant cousin by following his trail through Wales and North America, using the subterfuge of an investigative concert tour. I hope you enjoy the presentation, and thank you for choosing American Interior.

ONE

OF THE IMPROBABILITY
THAT
I WOULD EVER ENCOUNTER
A FIRST NATION AMERICAN
SAGEBRUSH RITUAL
IN THE
CANTON DISTRICT OF CARDIFF

(And in which I become a feature of said ritual)

In 1999 I was asked to write a musical score for a theatre production about the life of the explorer John Evans. I knew his story well, of course, so it seemed only natural that when the Native American and Welsh co-producers were looking for a songwriter, given my connection to him, they approached me.

I turned up late to my first meeting with the theatre company. In a modest brick building in the beautifully scruffy Canton district of Cardiff, Wales, I was unexpectedly initiated into the cast by ritual. I was made to sit on the floor, in a small circle of Native American and Welsh actors, by the veteran theatre director Elfed Lewis, briefed on the significance of the circle in Native American culture, then cleansed by the smoke of burning sagebrush by Carlisle Antonio, one of the long-haired actors.

Using a feather taken from the plumage of Crazy Horse and given to him by the great leader’s descendants, Carlisle immersed me in the smoke by fanning the feather up and down and around my body. I felt partly elated but also undeserving of such an accolade. I had the nudging feeling that I was a fraud and that it was all too reminiscent of a scene in that awful Doors biopic by Oliver Stone. I briefly imagined turning into an eagle or wolf or something, and, in the movie adaptation, I will.

Although I had refused to let myself go fully in the ceremony, when I returned home the generosity afforded to me from my cleansing became apparent, and I immediately began to write a ‘round’, or circular song, for the play. It seemed the principled thing to do. And it got me thinking deeper than ever before about John Evans’s strange and unusual journey.

A week later – on another frosty winter’s morning – I returned to Canton to play my music to the theatre group. The cast were in tears, however: Elfed Lewis, the bearded director, had collapsed at the previous day’s rehearsal and died overnight.

I never did get another opportunity to play them the round, but it goes like this:

Translation: ‘Here we are, sailing again, in circular time.’

TWO

THE LIFE OF A MUSICIAN
AND
THE COSMIC OMNIPRESENCE
OF
GWYN A. WILLIAMS

So, as I was saying, I am a songwriter and musician, and I am often called upon to travel around, playing my songs. Seemingly by chance, this touring will occasionally lead to some unexpected opportunity, or bring into my possession something that would have been completely unimaginable in my pre-touring life. For example, a collection of 1970s Turkish and Greek disco 7-inch singles; a pumpkin decorated with a hand-painted American flag in Athens, Georgia, by a member of the Olivia Tremor Control; and a green leather ‘Nigeria’ fridge magnet from Fela Kuti’s Shrine in Lagos. I’ve also, much to my surprise, acquired a working knowledge of Mexican mezcal production, Italian Socialist libraries, Japanese toilet fittings and the most potent betel nuts in Taipei. I often wonder to myself, ‘How did this happen?’

When I first moved to the Welsh capital city of Cardiff at the age of twenty-four to try to make my fortune with the Super Furry Animals, it was to a ground-floor flat on the Taff Embankment in the Strangetown district, in September, and it rained every day for four months. I had to wear waterproof overalls at all times. It was like living on a ship at sea, although I must admit I have no direct experience of this.

I now live in a Victorian terraced house in the French quarter, on the west side of the River Taff, which divides the city of Cardiff down the middle. I’ve lived in this house ever since I was thrown out of that nice flat above a bar in the student district, that time just after the referendum.

On this magical litter-strewn strip you can hear Welsh, English, Urdu, Punjabi, Cantonese, Thai, Malay, Romanian, Arabic and Somali – all spoken as first languages. I mostly speak Cat. I share the house with three of them, an older female and her two kittens. They don’t have human names yet. It was a casual garden arrangement at first, then a few years ago I let her into the house for the first time. I also have a mountain goat, who lives in the back garden, but he doesn’t like to be talked about so much. I am represented by a manager, who works out of an office a couple of blocks away, where the faxes are sent in to invite me on tour. She formerly managed a popular Scottish heavy-metal act that once had a number-one hit in Belgium.

As the whole world is represented in this part of the city, it should have come as no great surprise to me one day when my uncle mentioned that the popular historian Gwyn ‘Alf’ Williams had once lived on the very same street. In 1979 he published a great book, Madoc: The Making of a Myth, which was based on the research he undertook when he fronted a BBC documentary film of the same name, directed by Wil Aron.

At the time, Aron was better known for shooting Welsh-language horror films such as Gwaed ar y Sêr (‘Blood on the Stars’, 1976), in which leading Welsh celebrities were murdered in a variety of crude fashions by an evil kids’ choir; and O’r Ddaear Hen (‘Out of the Ancient Earth’, 1981), in which an ancient sacrificial stone turns up in the potato patch of an Anglesey council house, to deadly effect.

Not being taken up by any major cinema distributors, and in the absence back then of a Welsh-language TV channel, Gwaed ar y Sêr was screened in villages and school halls the length and breadth of the mountainous country. When my mother took me to watch it as a six-year-old, I had to be carried out, screaming, after Barry John, Wales’s most celebrated sporting hero, was torn to shreds by an exploding football. I witnessed O’r Ddaear Hen on a school trip at eleven; it gave me nightmares for months, and I was unable to close the curtains at night for years in fear that the Devil himself would jump out from behind the drapery and strangle me, as he had done to others, a running motif in the movie. And indeed, fantastical horror motifs in the form of melting southern sunsets and medieval fanfares pepper Williams’s academic overview of the Madog myth.

Significantly for my journey of verification, the book and the film include a detailed chapter or two on John Evans’s incredible journey in search of Madog’s descendants in America. In a clear and excitable stutter, Williams romanticizes the story and boosts the colour to maximum effect. Following my brush with Crazy Horse’s feather, this film became my guide to the life of John Evans, and the fact that the legendary Gwyn A. Williams had lived on my street whilst shooting it seemed an utterly unlikely cosmic coincidence.

Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia had been Williams’s hero and political guide, and after learning Italian to write about the communist leader Antonio Gramsci, he documented Welsh history through a series of books framed by the struggles of the working classes, from the coalfields of South Wales to the slate quarries of the North, being tied by blood to both. He married into a family of Spanish migrants, which gave his work an internationalist dimension, and was a fluent Spanish-speaker, going on to write a specialist book on the darker side of Goya’s printmaking portfolio. Presenting the ever-changing journey of Welsh history as being part of a wider world, he transmuted it into a palatable pill that, if swallowed whole, was apt to leave the reader an ardent supporter of Welsh independence. The root of Williams’s success was his ability to spin a good yarn, to tell a tall tale, to roll out the romance and invite you to read between the lines and fish out what had actually happened (and he was happy to broadcast this information, behelmeted, from a coalmining shaft).

Facts are fluids that occasionally overspill the vessel of truth. They leave a particular stain on the carpet that can take generations to fade away, and if the carpet is woven from the absorbent wool of the Welsh imagination, they may never disappear entirely. Such is the case with the myth of Madog, an unlikely proposition that became legendary and then, as a result, perhaps for a little while became the truth. It was this insane thread of history that propelled John Evans over the edge of the known Earth in 1796 and projected Williams, my neighbour, all the way from a terraced street in Cardiff to a celluloid sunset in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in the Gulf of Mexico.

THREE

THE HISTORY
OF
IMPERIAL WALES

Or how Prince Madog (possibly) discovered
America in the twelfth century

Wales, a rocky peninsular outcrop sticking out of the west of England into the Irish Sea, was the last refuge of the Brythonic ‘Welsh’ people, who had once roamed throughout the British Isle^* but by the sixteenth century had been pummelled remorselessly by the emerging English crown, ever since the Romans had left.

In 1282 Prince Llywelyn (the last monarch of the Cunedda dynasty, which had ruled over a fluid Brythonic proto-Welsh state for a millennium) was killed in an ambush by Edward I’s men. According to popular myth, when the Welsh declared that they would never accept an English-speaking ruler, Edward (who was in any case a French-speaking Norman) proclaimed his then-mute baby son (and future Edward II) the Prince of Wales (a sadistic joke, which, whether true or not, remains a tradition of the Windsor crown to this day: the heir apparent receives the title of the Welsh principality).

In the fifteenth century Owain Glynd r staged a rebellion, crowned himself prince, pledged an allegiance to the French Pope and set up the first Welsh parliament, in the centrally located town of Machynlleth. It was short-lived and Wales fell again, becoming the first colony of the English empire. The Welsh were forbidden from filling any official role, Glyndŵr’s planned university towns were scrapped and the new colonial state was administered from Ludlow, a market town located safely over the border in England. Then, in 1536, the Act of Union officially placed Wales under the direct rule of London.

The self-esteem of the Welsh was at an all-time low. The great Cistercian abbeys on the sites of the early Celtic churches, which housed the ancient manuscripts of Welsh civilization, would soon be burned to the ground, and any small glory that could be salvaged from the wreck of old Wales would have seemed like a beacon of hope – a confirmation that this damp, cold, mountainous land had once been a major colonial power; as the American musician Ian Svenonius would say, ‘the Portugal of the North’!

It was out of this depressing vacuum that the legend of Madog emerged. From a cynical perspective, Prince Madog was a most useful invention, based on a thirteenth-century romantic saga, ‘Madoc’, concerning a Welsh seafarer of Viking blood, from the pen of the Flemish bard ‘Willem’, best known for ‘Reynard the Fox’. It was Dr John Dee, a mystic of Welsh descent (and from a republican standpoint, the Goebbels to Queen Elizabeth I’s Hitler), who presented Madog as a historical figure – taking liberties with a post-Columbus Welsh take on the Madog story by his contemporary Humphrey Llwyd.

As the great colonial powers of Europe began to cast their greedy nets towards the Americas, Dee realized that if he could prove that the medieval Welsh had already settled there it would give a Brythonic monarch a moral claim to those lands, which were already being snapped up rapidly by the Spanish.

Thus, on 3 October 1580, Madog flapped and stumbled like an ill-prepared penguin into the history books. Dee, having upgraded and rebranded the jurisdiction of the English crown to what he now called the British empire, had prepared a warrant for Elizabeth, along with a map that claimed virtually the whole of North America in her name, on the basis that ‘The Lorde Madoc, sonne to Owen Gwynedd, Prince of Northwales, led a colonie and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabowts.’