The existence of Amazon warrior women was a mainstay of Western mythology. These women who fight on horseback and, it was sometimes said, had one of their breasts removed so as to better operate a bow, fought in the Trojan War according to Homer’s Iliad, one of the oldest surviving literary works of Europe, likely dating to the 8th century BCE. They did not cross over from myth to what might be considered history by some until around 450 BCE, when Greek historian Herodotus made reference to them as if they were real. When he encountered in Lycia a society that valued maternalism and traced kinship through matrilineal descent, he thought without evidence that they must be descended from the famous Amazons. And in describing the forerunners of the Sarmatian people, a matriarchal and equestrian culture, Herodotus writes “the story is as follows” and seemingly repeats an unsupported claim that their people were produced by some shipwrecked Amazons who procreated with Scythian men. While evidence has arisen to suggest real Eurasian warrior women inspired these tales, they fall squarely in the realm of myth, and evolved as they were embraced by other cultures. In Arabian legend, Alexander the Great was said to have married the Queen of the Amazons, and it was claimed that the homeland of the warrior women was on an island in the Indian Ocean, but in the Middle Ages, Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi located this mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean, and here we start to see hints of the modern day legends that inspired Wonder Woman. Unsurprisingly, in the 15th and 16th centuries, when explorers believed that they might encounter any number of such mythical isles across the great sea, such as Antillia or the Fortunate Isles, the notion that any island they might happen upon could be the isle of the Amazons loomed in imaginations. As a result, when explorers did make landfall, they looked for indications of a matriarchal culture as evidence of such a discovery. Christopher Columbus wrote in the log of his first voyage that some natives told him, no doubt in response to some leading and poorly translated questions, that some nearby island was inhabited only by women, and that they received male visitation only during certain times of the year for reproductive purposes. Columbus was actually well-versed in such myths and in Greek and Arab classic literature generally. He latched onto such indications with alacrity, quick to twist any native tales, whether poorly understood or even fabricated in an effort to please him, as proof of the existence of such mythological locations. In reality, it seems, the natives he was questioning were actually referring to an island on which they kept female prisoners for forced breeding. But this would not be the last time that Columbus or other explorers mistakenly believed they had discovered a mythical site. Another such myth, that of the Fountain of Youth, the spring that originated in paradise and rejuvenated those who bathed in or drank from it, was also sometimes prominent in the thoughts of New World explorers, though we find when we look further into this myth that it has become even more a myth, a historical myth, falsely claimed to have been a legend among native tribes and inaccurately asserted to have been the obsession and sole objective of the conquistador Juan Ponce de León’s expedition to Florida.

While the story of Ponce de León and his discovery of Florida during the course of his obsessive search for the Fountain of Youth has made him a rather famous and romantic historical figure, some may be surprised to learn that previous to the 20th century there was little interest in him and his expedition in search of the mysterious island called sometimes Bimini and other times Beniny. In 1913, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the supposed discovery of Florida, a variety of historians wrote more on the 1513 voyage of Ponce de León than had been written about him since the beginning of the 17th century. What they found was certainly a figure of interest who had fallen between the cracks of historiography and deserved to be more widely known. Juan Ponce de León, a youth of 19 years from an influential family, is said to have served as a page and squire and perhaps to have fought Muslims in the Granada War before joining the crew of Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, where he was present at the discovery of Puerto Rico. Lest anyone suspect that I glorify the memory of this man, it should be established that he was a conquistador at heart from the beginning. He was a nobody before 1504, and he won respect as well as a grant of land and native slaves for the large part he played in suppressing a Taíno rebellion on Higüey, a massacre described in nauseating detail by Bartolomé de las Casas. Four years later, after expanding Spanish colonization in the area, he was tasked by King Ferdinand with forcing all the remaining Taíno into servitude, mining gold for the Spanish coffers. And chasing gold, he then set out to explore and settle Puerto Rico, then called San Juan, and eventually would become the governor of the island. In 1513, however, having lost his governorship for reasons I will explain later, de León obtained a royal contract to seek out the rumored “islands of Beniny” northwest of Hispaniola, on the understanding that he would serve as their governor once settled. There are numerous myths associated with this journey that 20th century historians repeated based on 16th-century accounts, causing Ponce de León’s journey to be so thoroughly mythologized. One was that he landed at St. Augustine, the place where today in Florida an “Archaeological Park” daily attracts tourists as the site of his first landing. This land was purchased in 1868 by someone hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction, and lo and behold, within a few years of creating the park, one of his employees claimed to find a stone cross buried on the property, supposedly left by Ponce de León as a marker. As early as 1935, a historian riding the new popularity of stories about de León, T. Frederick Davis, tried to provide this claim with a veneer of scholarly respectability, claiming that navigational data showed his course would have taken him to St. Augustine. This interpretation of the data proved erroneous. In the 1950s, another historian, Edward Lawson, argued that testimonies and other archaeological evidence indicating the existence of a populous native village at the site proved it was where de León landed, when in fact he would likely have avoided such a landing site where natives might have repelled their boats. In fact, Ponce de León’s log indicates he looked for a landing site in this area but found no amenable inlet or harbor and thus moved on. Another big myth perpetuated by 20th-century historians actively renewing interest in Ponce de León’s voyage was that he had discovered Florida. The land of Florida, or it was called back then, the islands of Beimini or Beniny, had already been systematically raided by Europeans in slaving expeditions. This was how King Ferdinand and Ponce de León even knew to sail north of San Juan Bautista to find the land. His real legacy, his actual discovery, the Gulf Stream, that ocean current that would become so important as a marine highway, was largely overlooked by historians for a long time, overshadowed by the misconception that he had discovered Florida and by the myth that the whole purpose of his venture was to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Depiction of Spanish massacre of natives, courtesy John Carter Brown Library (CC BY-SA 4.0)

To give a sense of how widespread and accepted the idea was, in 1985, the historian Robert Weddle wrote, “That the Fountain of Youth legend influenced Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida has long been accepted as fact,” and though it did not prove the truth of it, the statement that it was accepted was surely accurate. The aforementioned work of T. Frederick Davis in 1935 explicitly claimed the search for a “spring” that was capable of “restoring youth to the aged” as the “Purpose of the Voyage,” and he claimed that Ponce de León was drawn on this quest because there existed an “Indian legend” that this spring could be found on “an island called Bimini (supposed by the Spaniards to be one of the Lucayos, or as we call them now, the Bahamas).” To give a sense of the inaccuracies in this 20th-century historiography, the island of Beniny or Beimini for which de León searched was not in the Bahamas, though this confusion may have eventually led to those islands being called the Bahamas. To illustrate this fact, Ponce de León put ashore at the northernmost of the Bahama islands, Guanahani, for ten days to prepare for his northwestward voyage across the open sea in his effort to reach the island of Beniny (actually the mainland of North America) that he knew lay somewhere in that direction. But this error was repeated by numerous historians, as was the insistence that de León was in search of the Fountain of Youth, to the point that the inaccuracies appeared in editions of Collier’s Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, and Encyclopedia Britannica, thereafter resulting in both myths being printed in school textbooks. The popularity in 20th-century historiography of the myth that Ponce de León was obsessed with finding the Fountain of Youth is sometimes blamed on the mythmaking of 19th-century American writer Washington Irving. Much as we saw Irving was largely responsible for myths surrounding Christopher Columbus, he also embellished the story of Ponce de León in some chapters of his 1831 work Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus. This work was produced just a little more than a decade after Spain renounced all claim to Florida to the U.S. in 1819, and we might consider this the first instance of a resurgence in interest in the voyage of Ponce de León, written with something of an axe to grind, as Irving depicts de León as vain and credulous. Even Irving acknowledges how far-fetched the idea seems that this conquistador would credit the tales he supposedly heard from natives about a river that restored youth when one bathed in it, writing: “It may seem incredible, at the present day, that a man of years and experience could yield any faith to a story which resembles the wild fiction of an Arabian tale; but the wonders and novelties breaking upon the world in that age of discovery almost realized the illusions of fable, and the imaginations of the Spanish voyagers had become so heated that they were capable of any stretch of credulity.” Whether or not Juan Ponce de León really was this credulous and truly had been searching for the Fountain of Youth will be further examined, but first let us examine the existence of the myth itself. Irving’s statement is at least true in this regard. As we have seen, the Spanish certainly chased after myths, and certainly transplanted their myths onto New World soil. And one of these transplanted myths certainly was that of the Fountain of Youth.

In my episode on Christopher Columbus, I explained how the idea of Earth’s roundness was not a novel idea Columbus had, as Washington Irving had suggested, but in truth, Columbus didn’t even believe the world was round. He had a notion that it was more pear-shaped, with a kind of nipple atop it, and atop this nipple, he believed, was the Garden of Eden at the point closest to heaven. While I call it a myth that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth, it does seem clear that Columbus was searching for this Terrestrial Paradise. Columbus carried a book by Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, which claimed that the earthly paradise must exist on some phantom island in the Atlantic, such as the Fortunate Isles, and Columbus treated the text like the authoritative source on global geography. He believed that in the Garden of Eden, from the Tree of Life, sprang a great fountain that served as the source of all the great rivers of the world. Indeed, when he reached the mouth of the Orinoco near Trinidad on his third journey, he wrote back to his royal patrons that he must have found that font of life springing from Paradise, for he had never dreamed of such a massive freshwater river. Columbus’s ideas about a fountain of life springing from the Terrestrial Paradise did not come from actual scriptures but rather from medieval legend, which had been grafted onto scriptural accounts of the Garden of Eden. Some claim that the origin of the Fountain of Youth myth, like the Amazonian myth, can be traced back to Herodotus, who once wrote of a long-lived people he called the Icthyophagi, or fish eaters, whose longevity owed to the peculiar quality of a fountain in whose oily waters they bathed. The myth of the Fountain of Youth as we know it today, though, and as the Spanish knew it in the 16th century, first seems to have arisen in the Alexander Romance, which was first composed in the 4th-century CE in Greek and was through the centuries translated into numerous languages in the Middle East before being printed in European vernacular languages in the 13th century. It spoke of Alexander finding a land of flowers where they stumbled across a golden fountain, inset with crystal and surrounded by marble pillars, into which four times a day flowed magical waters from a statue of a golden lion, and when his men bathed in it, their health and vigor were renewed, such that they were younger and could hardly be recognized. The 12th-century letter of Prester John, that anonymous hoax that I devoted a whole episode to discussing a few years ago, also brought this legend to European imaginations. The writer of that fictional account of a Christian king in a magical land far to the East indicates that there is a spring, flowing out of Paradise into a grove at the foot of Mount Olympus, and if one drank from it, they would “suffer no infirmity from that day on” and would forever be exactly thirty-two years old. Then the fountain appeared again in another dubious and anonymous work I’ve mentioned before, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the 14th century and attributed to an English knight who seems to have not existed. In this work, it is called the well of youth, is said to flow out of Paradise, prevent illness, and keep people young, and is placed in an imaginary Eastern city called Palombe. Given Columbus’s mistaken belief that he was sailing westward to reach the East, it was reasonable for him to think he might find such places as were described in these classical and medieval fantasies. But even other explorers and Spanish historians, after finally coming to the understanding that this was not the East they had set out to reach but rather a New World, a new continent to them, the rumors persisted, encouraged, it seems, but the myths of natives that seemed to indicate the fountain’s existence.

16th century depiction of the Fountain of Youth.

In 1516, in a letter to Pope Leo X, the Italian historian chronicling New World discoveries for Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, mentioned a “notable fountain” on an island he called Boyuca, whose waters rejuvenated the old who drank them. In one of his later histories he also shared the story of a native who had been made a slave and baptized a Christian that his father had bathed in a magical fountain in Florida and been made young again. Some historians cite these early claims as evidence that the Fountain of Youth was a legend among natives and was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, even though Martyr, who would have spoken with Ponce de León in his research, never claimed this. In fact, the story told to him by the captive native can easily be dismissed as unreliable, and also of a later origin. As for the original claim in the 1516 letter, some historians have, without evidence, suggested that Boyuca was actually Bimini, but in fact, this rumor Martyr was sharing was one heard on the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís, and the description of where this isle of Boyuca supposedly resided seems to place it closer to the Bay of Honduras. Moreover, any and all claims made by the Spanish that the natives they encountered had their own myths of a Fountain of Youth are hard to credit. Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as Spanish friar Ramón Pané and others, after living with Caribbean natives and learning their languages, wrote numerous works detailing the nature of the customs and religion of the indigenous peoples of the West Indies, including accounts of their folktales and myths, and none mention anything resembling a Fountain of Youth. Each supposed rumor of a Fountain of Youth in the Caribbean, coaxed out of natives through poorly translated interrogation, rather tellingly placed the mythical spring in a different place. Thus we might presume that all such “rumors” were actually just natives, failing to entirely understand the meaning of the question, pointing the Spanish toward various ordinary sources of water.

But if the myth of the Fountain of Youth was real, and if some Spanish were questioning natives and looking for it in the New World, why shouldn’t we credit the idea that this was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, as Washington Irving and so many 20th century historians claimed? This is a valid question, and it can be answered by looking at the sources relied on by those historians. The most cited of all sources that claim Juan Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth is the work of Antonio de Herrera, whose history of Ponce de León’s voyage, published in 1601, relied on the conquistador’s own log as primary source material. This very fact that it relied on Ponce de León’s log, as well as the fact that de Herrera was the official historiographer of Spain at the time, seems to lend his work credence, even though it was written some 80 years after the voyage. The problem is that nothing in Ponce de León’s log refers to the Fountain of Youth legend at all, and the only mentions of the myth appear in statements that de Herrera inserted, not based on the log at all. He never claims that the log reflects de León’s search for the fountain, or that any native guides were leading him to any rejuvenating spring. Once, he mentions the work of another author, Don d’Escalante Fontaneda, whose late 16th-century memoir claimed Ponce de León had been searching for the Fountain of Youth at a river in Florida called Jordan. And then at the end of his work, de Herrera simply says that Ponce de León never found that Fountain. This memoir by Fontaneda that de Herrera seems to have relied on for evidence of de León’s motivation is manifestly unreliable. Fontaneda was a colorful figure. He came from a noble family and like Ponce de León went into service at a young age, at just 13 years old. In 1549, he was shipwrecked in the Florida Keys, and while the natives there killed his shipmates, perhaps because of his youth they spared him, and he lived among these indigenous islanders for 17 years. Ten years after his rescue, he wrote his memoirs, and there is no reason to consider him an authority on the voyage of Ponce de León or much of anything beyond the culture of the particular natives he lived among on the Keys. Indeed, there is no River Jordan in Florida, and this appears to have been a kind of scriptural allusion to the river in which John the Baptist conducted the ritual of baptizing, which represents a kind of rebirth like the Fountain of Youth is said to provide, making the whole account more literary than historical.

17th century engraving of Juan Ponc e de León

There was, however, one principal, original source from which Fontaneda likely derived his account of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth, written in 1535 by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Indeed, the fact that de Oviedo was his predecessor as Spain’s official historiographer likely compelled de Herrera to make sure his later account of Ponce de León’s voyage fell in line with the earlier one. De Oviedo speaks explicitly and derisively of de León as a vain and avaricious egotist and claims that searching for the Fountain of Youth was the sole purpose of his voyage, specifically because Ponce de León hoped that the fabled spring might cure his enflaquecimiento del sexo, literally his “emaciation of sex,” meaning his impotence. The fact that the myth of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth originated with this claim, made 14 years after the conquistador had died and thus after he could protest, is ridiculous. It is libel, pure and simple, and there is evidence that it was false. Ponce de León was a portrait of machismo, just like his father, who sired dozens of illegitimate offspring. Having a philandering father and acting macho is surely no certain sign of virility, but Ponce de León fathered four children of his own with his wife, and it is known that he insisted on taking his mistress with him on his voyage. Some historians, seeking to bolster de Oviedo’s credibility, claimed that de León must have been older by the time of his voyage, thus suggesting his obvious virility must have been waning, but other historians have proven he was only 39 at the time. Then again, historians partial to de Oviedo’s myth about his search for the Fountain have suggested that it was not his own impotence he sought to cure with the waters of the Fountain, but that of King Ferdinand, who was older and had married a younger woman. But this is pure speculation, and there is no evidence of it. In fact, just as Ponce de León’s log makes absolutely no mention of the Fountain of Youth, so too his royal charter, the official patent issued by King Ferdinand, mentions nothing about searching for the Fountain of Youth. Rather, it indicates, in precise details, that the purpose and goal of his expedition was to explore and settle the large island of Beniny, which was actually not an island but the continental mainland, and which Ponce de León named Florida after his landing because of the flowers he admired there. In truth, as we know today, Ponce de León’s voyage was intended not to find a mythical fountain but to find gold and to expand the Spanish Empire, and on a more personal level, Ponce de León was seeking to reestablish his own power, which had recently been taken from him in a political struggle with Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus. Unprecedented rights had previously been granted to Columbus for his discoveries, and his son came to the New World to seize power, taking the position of Viceroy as his birthright and forcing Ponce de León out of power in Puerto Rico. King Ferdinand, who viewed Ponce de León as a faithful servant and resented the Columbus family’s growing power, encouraged de León to establish himself in Florida as both a reward and to ensure he still had loyal governors in the region. Though it is admittedly speculation, the fact that Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote with such admiration about Christopher Columbus and was personally acquainted with Columbus’s son, Diego Colón, suggests that perhaps his blatant slander of Ponce de León was simply a matter of personal bias against a man he had only heard about from friends who maligned his memory.

It is astonishing and disconcerting that one nasty statement by a biased historian almost 500 years ago could result in a falsehood being perpetuated even today. We see in this story how one unsupported statement is repeated by other historians through the ages, relying only on the views of historians who came before them rather than on primary source material, none of which actually support the claim that Florida was discovered in an effort to find a magical spring that grants eternal youth. In my principal source, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend,” published in Revista de Historia de Americá in 1998, Douglas Peck details each step of the way how this myth migrated from its Eurasian roots to the New World, how Oviedo maliciously made an unfounded claim about Ponce de León’s vain preoccupation with it, and how this lie was carried through the centuries and embellished even by otherwise conscientious historians until it entered encyclopedias and textbooks. It took more than 450 years to set the record straight, and with the myth now firmly rooted as common knowledge in the minds of most Americans, who knows how long it will take to replace the myth in the public imagination. After all, the false version has become a foundational story in Florida. Starting in 1900 with a new owner, the St. Augustine Archaeological Park was aggressively marketed as the actual Fountain of Youth, where tourists can pay the price of admission and drink some sulphury-smelling spring water that they’re told was the object of Juan Ponce de León’s 16th-century expedition. Indeed, this has become something of a tourist industry, with numerous mineral springs laying claim to the title of the real Fountain of Youth. We might even see this as a theme in Florida’s culture generally, with elderly retirees from all over the country moving there to find a new lease on life, and adults all over the world flying there to visit Disney World and feel young again. We could even see a parallel in the current political culture of Florida under their governor, who is determined to take his state, and the country if he ever manages to win higher office, backward rather than forward. And the idea of our national political culture reverting to a juvenile or infantile state should really scare all of us. Today the concept of the Fountain of Youth survives mostly as a metaphor. Just as the Holy Grail and El Dorado have become metaphors for an ideal or perfect thing that we may pursue, so too the Fountain of Youth has come to represent anything that we may use or do or seek out that makes us healthy or young at heart. The term is used heavily in marketing health and wellness products, as well as aphrodisiacs. Though the products have changed, we find that the myth has long been used by snake-oil salesmen to hawk whatever frauds they have on hand, and looking at the history of this myth, we find that maybe it was always used as a kind of deceptive marketing scam, to sell tickets to theme parks, to sell the idea of Florida, to sell a romantic version of European colonialism, and to sell a version of history tainted by myth.

An old postcard for the “Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park” in St. Augustine, Florida

Until next time, remember, even otherwise trustworthy and scrupulous historians are not immune to the spread of historical myths, but in due course, it seems, eventually, they do get revealed.

The Source of the Fountain of Youth Myth

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