Yr Hen Iaith part 75 – The earliest Welsh-American literature

Jerry Hunter

The first Welsh-language American book was published more than half a century before the birth of the United States.

Its author, Ellis Pugh, was one of a number of Welsh Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1686 in the pursuit of religious freedom. Pugh died in 1718, leaving the manuscript of a book he had written. It was published in Philadelphia in 1721.

As its title declares, this landmark Welsh-American book is a religious work: Annerch i’r Cymry, i’w Galw Oddiwrth y llawer o bethau at yr un peth angenrheidiol er mwyn cadwedigaeth eu heneidiau (‘An Address to the Welsh, in order to Call them away from the many things to the one thing essential for the salvation of their souls’).

Its opening sentence paraphrases the familiar beginning of the Christian metanarrative:

            Yn y dechreuad fe a greawdd Duw bob peth wrth ei fodd ei hunan, a dyn ar ei ddelw ei hun, uwchlaw yr holl greaduriaid, mewn Cyflwr pur, yn gymwys i wasanaethu ac i          anrhydeddu ei greawdwr: ond y Sarph, yr yspryd Cyfrwys gelyniaethol, a dywllodd        Efa . . . .

‘In the beginning God created everything according to his own liking, and man in his       own image, above all of the creatures, in a Pure state, fit to served and to honour his   creator: but the Serpent, the hostile Cunning spirit, deceived Eve[.]’

There is not much surprising about the book’s contents. However, it’s significance cannot be underestimated.

The fact that a Welsh-language book was published in America at this time in order ‘address the Welsh’ and ‘call to them’ in their own language testifies to the existence of an American Welsh-language community.

The book’s preface, written by the Quakers who ensured that Ellis Pugh’s work was published posthumously, describes this community as:

Y Cyfarfod Misol yng Ngwynedd yn sir Philadelphia Ym Mhensilvania, Oblegid ein Cyfaill ELLIS PUGH, Awdwr y traethawd sydd yn canlyn (‘The Monthly Meeting in Gwynedd in Philadelphia county in Pennsylvania, For the sake of our Friend, ELLIS PUGH, Author of the treatise which follows’).

This introduction is ‘signed in the name of Said Meeting’ – a seinwyd yn enw y Dywededig Gyfarfod by sixteen of its members. It’s worth listing their names here, seeing as they used the printing press in order to make a permanent record of their commitment to their Welsh-speaking American community: John Hugh,  David Meredith, Edward Ffoulk, Thomas Evan, John Humphrey, Robert Evan, Edward Robert, Owen Evan, Hugh Griffith, Cadwalader Evan, Meredith David, Robert Jones, Thomas Pugh, Evan Evans, Rowland Ellis and John Evans.

The Americas

If we expand the geographical scope to include all of the ‘Americas’, then it must be said that this was not the first Welsh-language text written in that part of the world. Welsh poetry was composed by sailors exploring the Caribbean and the coast of Central America in the sixteenth century.

Perhaps most notably, William Midleton from Llansannan in Denbighshire captained a ship which sailed to the Caribbean in 1596. A few years previously he had published a Welsh bardic grammar, and Captain Midleton diverted himself during those long hours on ship by translating the Psalms into Welsh and composing several original poems.

One of them, in the strict-metre cywydd form, is an adaptation of a literary convention stretching back to the first half of the fourteenth century.

Dafydd ap Gwilym and his medieval contemporaries had composed llatai poems, imaginative pieces commissioning a fanciful messenger to travel to and address a lover. In this cywydd llatai, the ship captain pretends to send a dolphin all the way from the American waters he was exploring to address his cousin, Tomas Wyn, back in Wales.

With charming turns of phrase, the poem highlights the geographical distance separating them, as seen in this couplet addressed to the dolphin: Dowaid fy mod yn rhodiaw / Dramawr drin rhyd y mor draw  (‘Say [to Tomas Wyn] that I am travelling / Abroad, journeying through the far sea’).

Fits and starts

During the first three centuries of the history of Welsh-American literature, texts appear in fits and starts, and it is difficult to ascertain the existence of what we might call a Welsh-American literary culture or even a Welsh-American literary tradition until the nineteenth century.

The collective statement manifest in the introduction to Anerch i’r Cymry is fairly unique in its suggestion of community. However, we can suppose that there was a enough of a Welsh-speaking religious community in Britain’s American colonies to warrant the publication of a book by the Baptist Abel Morgan, Cyd-gordiad Egwyddorawl o’r Scrythurau, neu gyfarwyddiad i gael pôb lle, o’r Scrythur Lân (‘An Alphabetical Concordance of the Scriptures, or direction for finding each place in the Holy Scriptures’).

This work was published in Philadelphia in 1730, nine short years after the appearance in print of Elis Pugh’s Anerch i’r Cymry.

When viewed through the lens of historical hindsight, the circumstances of the 1730 book’s production are extremely interesting, for it was printed by Benjamin Franklin. Yes, the man often seen as the most intellectual of the American ‘Founding Fathers’ printed a Welsh-language book more than forty years before the start of the American Revolution.

Our previous instalment ended by noting that the eighteenth-century poet Goronwy spent the final years of his life  as the owner of a tobacco plantation – and four slaves – in rural Virginia.

When he received a letter in 1767 informing him that his old mentor, Lewis Morris, had died, he sent his own letter back across the Atlantic to one of the deceased’s brothers. This included an elegy or marwnad in awdl form (a long poem using a combination of the traditional strict metres), mourning the passing of the most famous of the Anglesey Morris brothers.

Distance

Like that sixteenth-century cywydd by Captain Midleton, this awdl  incorporates the geographical distance separating Wales and the poet’s American location into the fabric of the poem:

Cyd bai hirfaith taith o’r wlad hon – yno

            Hyd ewynnog eigion,

  Trwst’neiddiwch trist newyddion

  Ni oludd tir, ni ladd ton.

‘Although it is a long tedious journey from that county – there

Across the foamy sea,

Lurching sad news [crosses the sea],

Land doesn’t hinder it, wave doesn’t stop it.’

The noun trwst[a]neiddiwch, ‘an awkwardness’ or ‘bungling’, related to the verb trwstaneiddio, ‘to move awkwardly’, suggests the lurching movement a ship, tossed by threatening waves as it crosses the Atlantic. It also suggests the awkward feelings felt upon receiving the news.

Goronwy Owen describes his American home in starkly negative terms in this poem:

Bro coedydd, gelltydd gwylltion, – pau prifwig,

            Pob pryfed echryslon;

  Hell fro eddyl llofruddion,

  Indiaid, eres haid, arw sôn.

‘A land of forests, of wild woods, – a backwoods place,

[full of] every kind of dreadful creature;

The ugly land of a nation of murderers,

The Indians, a strange horde, it is fearful to tell [of them].’

Like so many other American texts written in a variety of European languages during the period, this Welsh poet’s work is tempered by a colonial ideology.

He was growing wealthy on land taken shortly before his arrival from Native Americans, and he dismisses the dispossessed people as a barbaric nation deserving that dispossession.

By this time the seeds of a very different strain of Welsh-American writing about Native Americans had been sown, if not yet germinated.

Prince Madog

Back in the sixteenth century, John Dee served the colonial ambitions of Queen Elizabeth I by creating the story of Prince Madog, claiming that this ‘British’ explorer ‘discovered’ the Americas before the Spanish.

As shown in great detail by the late Gwyn Alf Williams, this imperialistic Tudor propaganda was based on a wholesale lie.

However, successive generations would believe it, including Welsh writers on both sides of the Atlantic who would seek out the legendary Madogwys or Madogiaid, a supposed hybrid nation of ‘Welsh Indians’.

Unlike mainstream colonial writing which consistently portrays Native Americans as an uncivilized other giving way to the ‘civilized’ Christian settlers, nineteenth-century Welsh-American writing about the Madogwys is often imbued with a friendlier tone.

The wishful thinking driving it would manifest a desire to prove the historicity of a long-standing Welsh-American community. However, this being at best fantasy and at worst an imperialistic lie, a fact-based history of Welsh-speaking Americans leads us back to that 1721 book’s preface and the Welsh-speaking Quaker community in Pennsylvania.

Goronwy Owen, by his own admission, did not belong to any kind of Welsh-American community. Indeed, in the letter accompanying his elegy for Lewis Morris he described his situation thus:

GORONWY OWEN, Person Llanandreas, yn swydd Brunswic, yn Virginia, yn y          Gogleddawl America; lle na chlybu, ac na lefarodd hauach ddeng air o Gymraeg er     ys gwell na deng mlyned.

‘GORONWY OWEN, vicar of St. Andrews, in Brunswick County, in Virginia, in Northern America; where he had not heard, nor spoken, as many as ten words of  Welsh in more than ten years.’

Further Reading:

The podcast episode which this piece accompanies was recorded in front of a live audience as part of the 2025 NAASWCH conference in Rio Grande, Ohio. In order to learn about NAASWCH: https://www.naaswch.wales/saesneg-home

Ellis Pugh, Annerich i’r Cymry (Philadelphia, 1721): https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/europeana-rise-of-literacy/expatriate-literature/annerch-ir-cymry-iw-galw-oddiwrth-y-llawer-o-bethau-at-yr-un-peth-angenrheidiol-er-mwyn-cadwedigaeth-eu-heneidiau .

Jerry Hunter, ‘Y Gymraeg y tu allan i Gymru: Cipolwg ar Lenyddiaeth Gymraeg yr Unol Daleithiau, 1838-65’, in Angharad Naylor, Llion Pryderi Roberts a Dylan Foster Evans (eds.), Beth yw’r Gymraeg? (Cardiff, 2023): https://www.uwp.co.uk/app/uploads/9781786839503_WEB-1.pdf .

Gwyn Alf Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford, 1987).

Chapter 4: ‘Yr Indiaid Cymreig: Y Cyfaill o’r Hen Wlad a Llên y Madogwys’ in Jerry Hunter, Llwybrau Cenhedloedd [:] Cyd-destunoli’r Genhadaeth Gymreig i’r Tsalagi (Cardiff, 2012).

Jerry Hunter, ‘Myth and Historiography: One Hundred and Sixty Years of Madog and the Madogwys’, in Kristin A. Cook a Robert Lawson-Peebels (eds.), Writing the Americas, 1480-1826 (special number: Yearbook of English Studies, 2016).