Fountain of Youth
Main article: Fountain of Youth
According to a popular legend, Ponce de León discovered Florida while searching for the Fountain of Youth. Though stories of vitality-restoring waters were known on both sides of the Atlantic long before Ponce de León, the story of his searching for them was not attached to him until after his death. In his Historia General y Natural de las Indias of 1535, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés wrote that Ponce de León was looking for the waters of Bimini to cure his aging.[55]A similar account appears in Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias of 1551.[56] Then in 1575, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, a shipwreck survivor who had lived with the Native Americans of Florida for 17 years, published his memoir in which he locates the waters in Florida, and says that Ponce de León was supposed to have looked for them there.[57] Though Fontaneda doubted that Ponce de León had really gone to Florida looking for the waters, the account was included in the Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas of 1615. Most historians hold that the search for gold and the expansion of the Spanish Empire were far more imperative than any potential search for the fountain.[58][59][60]
There is a possibility that the Fountain of Youth was an allegory for the Bahamian Love Vine, which locals brew today as an aphrodisiac.[61] Ponce de León could have been seeking it as a potential entrepreneurial venture. Woodrow Wilson believed Indian servants brewing a "brown tea" in Puerto Rico may have inspired Ponce de León's search for the Fountain of Youth.[62] Arne Molander has speculated that the adventurous conquistador mistook the natives' "vid" (vine) for "vida" (life) – transforming their "fountain vine" into an imagined "fountain of life".[61]
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