Rhirid set sail from Llandrillo (Rhos-on-Sea) in the cantref of Rhos to explore the western ocean. They purportedly discovered a distant and abundant land in 1170 where about one hundred men, women and children disembarked to form a colony. According to Humphrey Llwyd's 1559 Cronica Walliae and in many other copied sources, Madoc and some others returned to Wales to recruit additional settlers. After gathering eleven ships and 120 men, women and children, the Prince and his recruiters sailed west a second time to "that Westerne countrie" and ported in "Mexico", a fact that too was cited by Reuben T. Durrett in his work Traditions of the earliest visits of foreigners to north America, and stated he was never to return to Wales again. Madoc's landing place has also been suggested to be "Mobile, Alabama; Florida; Newfoundland; Newport, Rhode Island; Yarmouth, Nova Scotia; Virginia; points in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean including the mouth of the Mississippi River; the Yucatan; the isthmus of Tehuantepec, Panama; the Caribbean coast of South America; various islands in the West Indies and the Bahamas along with Bermuda; and the mouth of the Amazon River". Although the folklore tradition acknowledges that no witness ever returned from the second colonial expedition to report this, the story continues that Madoc's colonists travelled up the vast river systems of North America, raising structures and encountering friendly and unfriendly tribes of Native Americans before finally settling down somewhere in the Midwest or the Great Plains. They are reported to be the founders of various civilisations such as the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca. Sources The Madoc story evidently originated in medieval romance. There are allusions to what may have been a sea voyage tale akin to The Voyage of Saint Brendan, but no detailed version of it survives. The earliest certain reference to a seafaring Madoc or Madog appears in a cywydd by the Welsh poet Maredudd ap Rhys (fl. 1450–1483) of Powys, which mentions a Madog who is a son or descendant of Owain Gwynedd and who voyaged to the sea. The poem is addressed to a local squire, thanking him for a fishing net on a patron's behalf. Madog is referred to as "Splendid Madog ... / Of Owain Gwynedd's line, / He desired not land ... / Or worldy wealth but the sea." A Flemish writer called Willem, in around 1250 to 1255,