Make America Welsh Again

An interesting article on how the Welsh discovered America and therefore all your base are belong to us, as the old saying goes. Clearly we own America now, so y'all better get ready to switch from ham to lamburgers, start playing the harp, stop saying y'all (seriously, the ll sound is pretty horrible in Welsh) and start singing in male voice choirs. Oh, and expect a swift return to coal mining. And I'm pretty sure I'd heard of a different Welsh claim to America than this one, so our double claim clearly trumps (if you will) everyone else's.

Actually, we don't really want America - it is a silly place. We think your politics is shite but we don't care about own own, so we'd be no good at it anyway. Come to think of it, I didn't hear of Welsh claims to America until about a decade ago, so it's not as if every Welsh schoolchild grows up dreaming of their lost birthright.

But just what are these claims, anyway ? We need not dwell on them as they're obviously daft, but they should be mentioned.

The story goes something like this. In 1170, Owain, ruler of the Kingdom of Gwynedd, in what is now north Wales, died. His sons quickly set about contesting the succession and plunged the country into civil war.

It should be noted that the Welsh had a very egalitarian but ultimately stupid policy when it came to inheritance : all property was divided equally among the sons, not given preferentially to the eldest. This meant that in a power struggle they were all on essentially equal rooting, making chaos all but inevitable. And Gwynedd, though then its own country, was very much "in what is now north Wales" back in 1170 - it hasn't gone anywhere.

One of Owain's youngest sons, Madog, was disgusted by the fighting and set off in search of something better. As Humphrey Llwyd put it in his 1584 history, "Cronica Walliae," Madog "left the land in contention betwixt his brethren, and prepared certaine ships with men and munition, and sought adventures by seas, sailing West, and leaving the coast of Ireland so far north, that he came to a land unknowen, where he saw manie strange things." Finding the land lush and plentiful, Madog reportedly left a small number of his crew there to build a settlement and returned to Wales, where he gathered more followers and ships and set off west again, never to return.

Which is fine as legends go. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the legend was taken apparently seriously in the worst possible way.

Jones' account reignited interest in a more than half-a-century-old story popular on both sides of the Atlantic that Christopher Columbus had been beaten to the Americas by almost 300 years by a Welsh prince, and that therefore the New World belonged not to the Spanish crown but to the English. The rights of indigenous people who had been there for millennia not deemed worth considering.

Except that the conquest of Wales by the English took place more than a century after Madog died, so any "claim" by the English to own it is immediately bunk on that score, even ignoring the natives (whose claim was much better than anyone else's). It would be a literal case of "all your base are belong to us" : we conquered you, therefore we own everything you own, even if someone else owns it now. And let's not forget that since the Spanish got there "first", even this claim could never be anything more than a lame pretext and/or justification for military conflict.

I think we can skip over how the Welsh lost America legends were disproven. More importantly :

"There is extensive literature on travellers discovering American Indians who were fluent in some European or Asiatic language," Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in in his history of European settlement of North America. "Uneducated travellers were apt to regard every Indian language as gibberish, and so compared it with some known language such as Welsh, Basque, Hebrew, or Finnish, that was also gibberish to them."

Which underlies an anti-Welsh racism as well, of course : the English being happy to replace one set of unfamiliar barbarians with the more traditional variety.

Traipsing through the deep Amazon jungle in the early 1900s in search an advanced civilisation he called Z, British explorer Percy Fawcett was sure he would find evidence of Indians who had descended from Western civilisation. "Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilisations were capable of springing up independently of each other," according to his biographer David Grann.

Writing that he had discovered a number of White Indians in the jungles of Panama who spoke "a language related to ancient Sanskrit," explorer Richard Marsh said they offered hints into "how white men evolved from the primeval brown race" and evidence of "at least two great white-influenced civilisations" in central and south America.

But here's the thing : racism is normal. It's practically a psychological universal. For one thing, Dunbar's number (a.k.a. the monkeysphere) suggests that we automatically dehumanise anyone we don't actually know personally, to different degrees. For another, we're rational enough to try and imitate those we admire, but unfortunately not clever enough to figure out which attributes are the important ones so we try everything. The converse of this is that any undesirable properties we find in someone of a different race lead to racial prejudice.

Racism has been with us throughout all of history. It isn't a modern phenomena, and it's certainly not peculiar to white people : it's a flaw in our very nature. It is true that no-one is born racist, and even more true that no-one is born automatically hating those of another race. Those things have to be learned - but not necessarily taught. It seems too prevalent that we should blame it all on history. More likely, this way of thinking is perfectly natural and a perilously easy trap to fall into.

But there is course a difference between casual racism and the sort that leads to atrocities. I doubt that many of the people I heard in school making racist jokes would decide it would be fun to go lynching every evening, or that Jeremy Clarkson (or even Nigel Farage) actually want to go around beating up dark-skinned people. That's why racism is a very common allegation : because it is a common phenomenon, a quite everyday sort of fallacy. It's harmful, yes, but harm is a matter of degree. The kind of racism that leads to genocide, however, is much rarer and more complex. I think it does us little good to chastise people guilty of the former as though they were as bad as the latter, but, nevertheless, the reason that "racism" is such a common allegation is simply because it is a very common fault. Jeremy Clarkson, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are all big fat racists, but in reality it's strongly a matter of degree, whereas the term used to be practically synonymous with "Nazi".

Would we do better if we treated racism as a fallacy, the kind of faulted logic that we're all guilty of from time to time ? I don't know, but I do think we should view racism as more of a natural outgrowth of human stupidity and less of a choice made only be evil people. Such people do exist, and such ideologies do stem in part from this flawed thinking. But not every thoughtless joke belies a propensity for hatred, nor even does every act of discrimination indicate that we are all hopelessly lost. Overcoming racism in its entirely is probably impossible. Overcoming the ideologies of hatred, however... well, we have to believe that's possible, or what's the point ?

Part of the attraction of the Madog myth was the romance inherent in setting off on an amazing journey and settling a new land. But a group of people did do this, and a long time before a mythical 12th century Welsh prince was even born, crossing into North America from Siberia over the Bering Strait. Their descendants spread out across the entire continent, building towns and cities and creating complex societies. They thrived for thousands of years before European invaders, and their infectious diseases, brought widespread death to the Americas, forever shaping their future.

The racist origins of the myth a Welsh prince beat Columbus to America

Morgan Jones was close to starving. It was 1660 and he and his boat crew had been stranded at Oyster Point, in modern-day South Carolina, for almost eight months, running low on food with no hope of rescue.