Book One in The Madoc Saga.
Three hundred years before Columbus, a Welsh sea captain discovered the New World...
A.D. 1170—Embittered by the tyranny of the English monarchy, Welsh Prince Madoc sailed with ships of settlers across the Western Ocean in search of a new home. Three centuries before Columbus, he landed on the southern coast of North America and there founded a colony of free Welsh in fertile but alien terrain. As they sought to carve out a settlement, they encountered tribes of Native Americans—and shared their struggle to survive in a wild land.
An archaeologist reviews MADOC and MADOC'S HUNDRED:
"Pat Winter's first two novels of The Madoc Saga take inspiration from the legend that a Welsh prince set sail to colonize North America in the twelfth century A.D., the Medieval period in Britain and the Mississippian period in most of the Southeast. Whether such a voyage can be proven to have taken place is irrelevant to the novelist. How thoroughly and vividly the novelist can recreate the Middle Ages in North America is very relevant to...(archaeologists)...reflecting both the state of our data and the effectiveness of our presentation of what we think we know...
Some of us who work on the front lines of public education in archaeology often wonder if we are really making any headway, or less pessimistically, whether there is a bigger audience out there than we are reaching...I think that the Madoc series is the best fictional recreation of the late prehistoric Southeast that I have ever read. We may argue some details, cringe occasionally at fictional license, but we should learn from the successes and ponder the points of disagreement thatthese two novels embody. And if, suddenly, we spend a moment seeing a village rather than a pile of shreds, Winter has done us a favor as well."—Kit Wesler, director Wickliffe Mounds, Kentucky, from his review in Southeastern Archaeology, Vol. II, No. 2, Winter 1992, by the Southeastern Archaeological Conference.