Michael D. Jones(1822–1898)

Michael Daniel Jones was born at Llanuwchllyn at the head of Bala Lake in the Welsh-speaking heart of Merionethshire on the second of March 1822, eldest son of the Reverend Michael Jones, Principal of the Bala Independent College, and Mary Lloyd of Llanrwst. He was schooled at the Bala grammar, took his ministerial training at the Carmarthen Presbyterian College from 1837 to 1841, served two years as Independent minister at Cincinnati, Ohio (1847 to 1849) where he observed at first hand the assimilation of the Welsh-American emigrant communities into Anglophone American culture and the loss within a generation of the Welsh language, and returned to Wales in 1850 with the settled conviction that the only secure way to preserve the Welsh language and Welsh national culture was a Welsh-language community on a piece of ground large enough that no surrounding Anglophone polity would dilute it.

He succeeded his father as Principal of the Bala Independent College in 1855 in his thirty-third year and held the position for the next thirty-six years. From the Bala college he became from 1858 the central organising figure of the Welsh emigration movement (Mudiad Gwladfa Gymreig) which proposed the foundation of a Welsh-language settler community at a location outside the existing Anglophone empires. He considered Vancouver Island, Palestine, and the eastern Cape Colony in turn, before settling on the Chubut Valley in Patagonia, the largely-unsettled steppe-country of the Argentine government, on the basis of negotiations with the Argentine government from 1862 through the Argentine consul in Liverpool Lewis Jones.

The first contingent of a hundred and fifty-three Welsh settlers sailed from Liverpool on the tea-clipper Mimosa on the twenty-fifth of May 1865, landed at the Bay of New Bay on the twenty-eighth of July 1865, and founded the settlement of Trerawson (Rawson) on the south bank of the Chubut River. Michael D. Jones did not himself sail with the first contingent (he remained at Bala as the metropolitan fundraiser and recruiting organiser) but committed all of his personal capital and a substantial bank loan to the financing of the Mimosa voyage. The early years of the settlement were close to collapse from drought, floods and the difficulty of the steppe agriculture; he raised supplementary funds from the Welsh Independent congregations across north Wales and the United States through the late 1860s to keep the settlement viable. By 1875 the settlement had stabilised under the leadership of the cooperative farmer Aaron Jenkins and his wife Rachel Jenkins (who introduced the irrigation channels from the river that made wheat-growing possible) and had spread north and west to Gaiman, Trelew and the precordillera frontier settlement of Cwm Hyfryd (Trevelin) in the foothills of the Andes.

Y Wladfa Gymreig, the Welsh Settlement, today comprises some six thousand fluent Welsh speakers in the Chubut Valley townships of Gaiman, Trelew, Trevelin, Esquel and Puerto Madryn, has its own Welsh-language schools, chapels, eisteddfodau (annual cultural festivals), the Patagonian National Eisteddfod (held at Trelew every October since 1875), and is the only continuously Welsh-speaking community of substantial size outside Wales. The Argentine state recognises the Welsh language as a community language of Chubut Province; the British Council operates a Welsh-language teaching programme between Wales and the Welsh-Argentine schools. He died at Bala on the second of December 1898 in his seventy-seventh year. The Jones name in modern Welsh national history carries the weight of the Mimosa voyage of 1865 and the Welsh-language community that has held the Chubut Valley for over a hundred and sixty years.