Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd

Madoc (Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd was a folkloric twelfth-century Welsh explorer, attested to be the son of Owain ap Gruffudd (Owain Gwynedd), King of Gwynedd and Prince of the Welsh. Madoc was said to have taken a sea voyage west from Wales after the death of his father in 1170, during which he discovered an unknown land, subsequently returning to Wales and organising a colonial expedition to said land, one that was never heard from again following their departure. During the Age of Discovery, the story of Madoc was seized on as part of English efforts to establish claims in the Americas, and later still became the origin for American colonial folklore regarding Welsh Indians in North America (which, in turn, may have played a part in the Cherokee folklore of the Moon-Eyed People).

Reading

• Burder, George (1797), The Welch Indians, or, A Collection of Papers Respecting a People Whose Ancestors Emigrated From Wales to America In the Year 1170 With Prince Madoc (Three Hundred Years Before the First Voyage of Columbus): And Who Are Said Now to Inhabit a Beautiful Country On the West Side of the Mississippi, London: Printed for T. Chapman, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100257276 
• Bowen, Benjamin Franklin (1876), America Discovered by the Welsh in 1170 A.D., Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000289406 
• Stephens, Thomas; Reynolds, Llywarch (1893), Madoc: an Essay on the Discovery of America by Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd in the Twelfth Century, London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100332210 
• Lewis, Benjamin F. (1894), "The Madog Tradition: The Search for the Madogians, and Other Incidents in the Welsh History of Utica, Past and Present", Transactions of the Oneida Historical Society, 1892-1894 (Utica, N.Y.: Printed for the Society, L. C. Childs & Son) 6: 117-136, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435058134503&view=1up&seq=121