Note 109 — CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

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]