The Forgotten Flag

The Welsh prince who (maybe) discovered America before anyone else

“Happy Seditious Insurrectionist Day!”

It’s the Fourth of July as I write this, and that means flags are flying.

Not sparks and fireworks though—at least, not here in Austin and Central Texas. Rain storms are putting a literal damper on festivities. And since I’m not out celebrating our nation’s freedom by blowing up a small part of it, I thought maybe I’d celebrate by writing. For a change.

I love this day, honestly. Fireworks, family, brisket. I love the symbolism, too. I love that we have a day to pause and celebrate this strange and glorious experiment called America. The hands-down greatest country on Earth—and yes, we are willing to fight about it.

If that bugs you, don’t even get me started on my love of Texas.

My red-blooded patriotism aside, sometimes on a day like this I like to pause for a spell and think about the stuff we don’t talk about as much. The stories that aren’t seen even in the light of fireworks. The quieter myths and mysteries that didn’t make it into textbooks but still whisper beneath the folds of our founding story.

One of those stories is Prince Madoc of Wales.

A Stranger in the New World

Legend has it that Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd—12th-century Welsh prince, sailor, and, depending on who’s telling the story, a bit of a romantic—left Wales around 1170 CE, searching for peace after a brutal succession war among his siblings. He sailed west into the Atlantic with a handful of ships, disappeared over the horizon, and landed in what would later be called America.

Or so it goes.

According to the story, Madoc and his crew settled somewhere along the Gulf Coast—perhaps not quite in my stomping grounds, near Galveston, but maybe Alabama, maybe Florida. There, in those waters turned murky by the output of the Mississippi and other rivers, they made contact with native peoples. They may have even intermarried. And then, a few years later, Madoc sailed back to Wales to gather more settlers.

At that point, he vanished from history entirely.

This is, I admit, the kind of story one might file under “probably folklore” and keep reading. But it keeps showing up—first in Welsh oral tradition, then in Elizabethan propaganda, then in 17th- and 18th-century travel logs, letters, and speculative histories. Some early American frontiersmen even swore they encountered “Welsh-speaking” Native Americans living in fortified villages along the Missouri River.

Was any of it true?

Maybe. Maybe not. But man, think of the possibilities and implications.

The Stories That Came Before Ours

Here in the States, we tend to treat 1492 as the “start” of history. And 1776 as the beginning of our story. The rest is background. Prologue.

But these half-buried stories—echoes of half-remembered encounters and almost-empires—suggest something different. Something older. Something stranger.

There’s something deeply American, I think, about the idea of lost flags—of people arriving, settling, trying to build something, and then fading into the amnesia of history. Maybe we never find signs or ruins. Maybe we don’t even know what language they spoke. But the deeper we dig and the more we look, the more convinced we are that they were here. And something about that feels... honest.

In my novel The Coelho Medallion, I played with this by writing about Vikings landing on American shores years prior to Columbus. I took it further by bringing those Vikings inland, having them make contact with native tribes, and leaving behind a legacy and a legend that persisted to modern day. It was all fiction until people started finding evidence to suggest it might be fact.

We tend to only remember European boots hitting the shores of the Americas in 1492. And this nation I love so much started on July 4th, 1776. But the truth is, America didn’t start on either of those dates. That’s just when someone wrote it down.

The evidence keeps growing that the New World kept getting discovered again and again, in the quiet, dark of lost history.

Just imagine all that we may have forgotten.

A NOTE AT THE END

I’m aware of my nation’s darker moments. What I love, though, is how we’ve insisted on growing out of them, over and over. Anyone who downplays the contribution of the United States to the shaping of the free world is fooling themselves. And the freedom-loving American in me is happy to let you do it. Because freedom.

But I love the concept of an alternate history. Always have. A what-if America has so much potential for good storytelling.

Closely tied to that, I love learning that there are pages in our history books that got stuck together and overlooked as we thumbed our way through. It’s in these crevices and cracks, these secret places, that I find a lot of inspiration, as a novelist. These are the stories I love to tell.

And it seems like we’re never going to run out of them.

Happy Independence Day to my American readers!

Happy Seditious Insurrectionists Day my British friends.

And Happy The US is Gloating Again Day to the rest of the world.

God bless and good reading.

READ A BOOK, SAVE THE WORLD

OK, maybe it won’t “save the world.” But the scary part is, you can’t know that for sure.

Better play it save and visit https://kevintumlinson.com/books to find something to read over a holiday weekend or on a rainy day. Or just in case of Welsh invasion.