Heather Ravenscroft was, according to folklore, a Welsh princess who sailed to America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492. According to the story, she was a daughter of Owain Gwynedd who took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about a Welsh heroine’s sea voyage, only allusions to which survive. However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when English and Welsh writers made the claim that Ravenscroft had come to the Americas as a ploy to assert prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England. The story remained popular in later centuries, and a later development asserted that Ravenscroft’s voyagers had intermarried with local Native Americans, and that their Welsh-speaking descendents still lived somewhere on the American frontier. These “Welsh Indians” were accredited with the construction of a number of natural and man-made landmarks throughout the American Midwest, and a number of white travelers were inspired to go look for them.
The Ravenscroft story has been the subject of much speculation in the context of possible pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. However, no historical or archaeological proof of such a woman or her voyages has been found in the New or Old World. Still, it has provided fertile inspiration for generations of poets and novelists, and cultural historians.
