According to a Welsh statement, Madoc, a prince of Wales, sailed westward from his country in 1170 and found an unknown land where, on a second voyage, he planted a colony of his people. This settlement wass supposed to be in the Carolina, and it is said that Indians once lived among the Tuscaroras of Eastern North Carolina and spoke the Welsh language!
There is the story that in 1660, Rev. Morgan Jones, a Welsh clergyman seeking to travel by land from South Carolina to Roanoke, was captured by the Tuscarora Indians and then settled in North Carolina.
Also, Morgan declares that his life was spared because he spoke Welsh, which some of the Indians understood; that he could converse with them in Welsh, though difficult; and that he remained with them for months, sometimes preaching to them in Welsh. John Williams, LL.D., who reproduced the statement of Mr. Jones in his work on the story of Prince Madog's Emigration, published in 1791, explained it by assuming that Prince Madog settled in North Carolina, and that the Welsh colony, after being weakened, was incorporated with these Indians.
If we believe the story of Mr. Jones, it is necessary to accept this explanation. It will be recollected that, in the early colony times, the Tuscaroras were sometimes called 'White Indians.' (J. D. Baldwin’s Pre-historic Nations, 1869, 402-403.)
Was this North Carolina’s third "Lost Colony?" Whether these stories or any of them be accepted, the American Indians were unquestionably the first discoverers of America. Old maps of Indian villages cover the American Continent. Finally, all the controversies on the subject merely relate to this question. Who were the discoverers of America?
In 1670, John Lederer, a Virginia explorer into North Carolina, discerned from the Catawbas "that within two days journey and a half from hence to the southwest, a powerful nation of bearded men were seated, which I suppose to be Spaniards because the Indians never had beards."
In 1669, when Sir William Berkeley, the Governor of Virginia, expected to find silver mines in North Carolina because the Spanish had found many silver mines in the region.
In 1690, James Moore, secretary of the colony, settled at Charlestown in South Carolina and explored the upcountry to the mountains until he reached a place where his Indian guides informed him that twenty miles away, Spaniards were mining and smelting with furnaces and bellows.
Numerous traces of mining operations in Western North Carolina before the English came discovered iron implements (unknown to Indians) near Lincolnton, some at King’s Mountain, and some in Cherokee County, which the Cherokees said had been made by Spaniards from Florida for three summers until the Cherokees killed them.
Thus, the Spaniards lived and mined in Western North Carolina for more than 125 years, from 1540 to 1690 and later.