Customer Reviews

Madoc and the Discovery of America

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This is a very evenhanded, exacting overview of an intriguing subject. The basic story Richard Deacon is investigating here is an old legend, that America may have been reached in the year 1170 A.D. (the year Henry II apparently had Thomas a Becket slain in Canterbury Cathedral), by a Welsh prince named Madoc. This is one of those tales that is just so exciting that people seem to latch onto it, and draw upon it for their need for Mystery in life. People who want it to be true call the legend "controversial." People who disagree with it call it "a heap of rubbish." Deacon's survey of the evidence is cooler-headed than many books out there, although he does ultimately want the tale to be true. He talks about the Mandan tribe of North Dakota in a fairly dispassionate way -- they, for the record, are brought forth most often as candidates for being the descendants of Prince Madoc's colonists. Some authors start from a point of being convinced that this story is true, and write in a very angry way. You can almost hear them yelling at the detractors of their legend. Deacon does not do this, and his book is basically quite informative. I also recommend looking at the cover story in the January 2000 edition of the "Atlantic Monthly", and at the fictional work "Children of First Man" by James Thom, a speculative tale of what the lives of these putative settlers may have been like. Two thumbs up.