Fountain of Youth

thumb|[[The Fountain of Youth (Cranach)|The Fountain of Youth, 1546 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder]]

The Fountain of Youth is a mythical spring which supposedly restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters. Tales of such a fountain have been recounted around the world for thousands of years, appearing in the writings of Herodotus (5th century BCE), in the Alexander Romance (3rd century CE), and in the stories of Prester John (early Crusades, 11th/12th centuries CE).

Stories of similar waters also featured prominently among the people of the Caribbean during the Age of Exploration (early 16th century); they spoke of the restorative powers of the water in the mythical land of Bimini. Based on these many legends, explorers and adventurers looked for the elusive Fountain of Youth or some other remedy to aging, generally associated with magic waters. These waters might have been a river, a spring or any other water-source said to reverse the aging process and to cure sickness when swallowed or bathed in.

The legend became particularly prominent in the 16th century, when it became associated with the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, the first Governor of Puerto Rico. Ponce de León was supposedly searching for the Fountain of Youth when he traveled to Florida in 1513. Legend has it that Native Americans told Ponce de León that the Fountain of Youth was in Bimini.

Early accounts

thumb|left|[[Persian miniature depicting Khidr and Alexander watching the Water of Life revive a salted fish]]

Objects that can sustain or restore youth are common in ancient literature. Sîn-lēqi-unninni's The Epic of Gilgamesh (1300 BCE–1000 BCE) describes a magical plant called The-Old-Man-Will-Be-Made-Young that grows in the watery abyss.

Herodotus mentions a fountain containing a special kind of water in the land of the Macrobians, which gives the Macrobians their exceptional longevity.

A story of the "Water of Life" appears in the Alexander romance, which describes Alexander the Great and his servant crossing the Land of Darkness to find the restorative spring. These earlier accounts inspired the popular medieval fantasy The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which also mentions the Fountain of Youth as located at the foot of a mountain outside Lombe (modern Kollam) Due to the influence of these tales, the Fountain of Youth legend was popular in courtly Gothic art, appearing for example on the Gothic ivory casket Casket with Scenes of Romances and several ivory mirror-cases, and remained popular through the European Age of Exploration.

thumb|French 14th-century ivory mirror case with a Fountain of Youth

European iconography is fairly consistent, as The Fountain of Youth (Der Jungbrunnen), a painting by Cranach, and an ivory mirror-case from 200 years earlier demonstrate: Der Jungbrunnen depicts old people, often carried, who enter at left, strip, and enter a pool that is as large as space allows. The people in the pool are youthful and naked, and after a while they leave it, and are shown fashionably dressed enjoying a courtly party, sometimes including a meal. On the carved ivory mirror-cover, elderly men and women walk or travel by cart from the left to the mythical Fountain of Youth at the right. They bathe and reemerge as young couples who enter into the castle at the center and the court above.

There are countless indirect sources for the tale as well. Eternal youth is a gift frequently sought in myth and legend, and stories of things such as the philosopher's stone, universal panaceas, and the elixir of life are common throughout Eurasia and elsewhere.

An additional inspiration may have been taken from the account of the Pool of Bethesda where a paralytic man was healed in the Gospel of John. In the possibly interpolated , the pool is said to be periodically stirred by an angel, upon which the first person to step into the water would be healed of whatever afflicted them.

Bimini

According to legend, the Spanish heard of Bimini from the Arawaks in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The Caribbean islanders described a mythical land of Beimeni or Beniny (whence Bimini), a land of wealth and prosperity, which became conflated with the fountain legend. By the time of Ponce de Leon, the land was thought to be located northwest towards the Bahamas. Bimini was the island that Ponce's royal contract stipulated that he was to seek and discover. This land was conflated with the Boinca or Boyuca mentioned by Juan de Solís, although Solís's navigational data placed it in the Gulf of Honduras. The archaeologist and historian Sam Turner says that according to Herrera's abridged account of the 1513 voyage, the only one known to have been taken from the original 1513 logs, Ponce's fleet altered course "though Bimini did not lie in that direction".

Ponce de León

thumb|upright=1.3|19th-century German artist's impression of [[Juan Ponce de León and his explorers drinking from a spring in Florida while supposedly seeking the Fountain of Youth]]

In the 16th century the story of the Fountain of Youth became attached to the biography of the conquistador Juan Ponce de León. As attested by his royal charter, Ponce de León was charged with discovering the land of Beniny. Although the indigenous peoples were probably describing the land of the Maya in Yucatán, the nameand legends about Boinca's fountain of youthbecame associated with the Bahamas instead. However, Ponce de León did not mention the fountain in any of his writings throughout the course of his expedition.

The connection was made in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's Historia general y natural de las Indias of 1535, in which he wrote that Ponce de León was looking for the waters of Bimini to regain youthfulness. Some researchers have suggested that Oviedo's account may have been politically inspired to generate favor in the courts. A similar account appears in Francisco López de Gómara's Historia general de las Indias of 1551. In the Memoir of Hernando d'Escalante Fontaneda in 1575, the author places the restorative waters in Florida and mentions de León looking for them there; his account influenced Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas' unreliable history of the Spanish in the New World. Fontaneda had spent seventeen years as an Indian captive after being shipwrecked in Florida as a boy. In his Memoir he tells of the curative waters of a lost river he calls "Jordan" and refers to de León looking for it. However, Fontaneda makes it clear he is skeptical about these stories he includes, and says he doubts de León was actually looking for the fabled stream when he came to Florida.

Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park

thumb|Postcard from the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine

The city of St. Augustine, Florida, is home to the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, a tribute to the spot where Ponce de León was supposed to have landed according to promotional literature, although there is no historical or archaeological evidence to support the claim. There were several instances of the property being used as an attraction as early as the 1860s; the tourist attraction in its present form was created by Luella Day McConnell in 1904. Having abandoned her practice as a physician in Chicago and gone to the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, she purchased the Park property in 1904 from Henry H. Williams, a British horticulturalist, with cash and diamonds, for which she became known in St. Augustine as "Diamond Lil".

Around the year 1909 she began advertising the attraction, charging admission, and selling post cards and water from a well dug in 1875 for Williams by Philip Gomez and Philip Capo. McConnell later claimed to have "discovered" on the grounds a large cross made of coquina rock, asserting it was placed there by Ponce de León himself. In 1981 the St. Augustine Historical Society obtained the personal testimony of a city resident who witnessed the cross being laid. McConnell continued to fabricate stories to amuse and appall the city's residents and tourists until her death in a car accident in 1927.

Walter B. Fraser, a transplant from Georgia who managed McConnell's attraction, then bought the property and made it one of the state's most successful tourist attractions. The first archaeological digs at the Fountain of Youth were performed in 1934 by the Smithsonian Institution. These digs revealed a large number of Christianized Timucua burials. These burials eventually pointed to the Park as the location of the first Christian mission in the United States. Called the Mission Nombre de Dios, this mission was begun by Franciscan friars in 1587. Succeeding decades have seen the unearthing of items which positively identify the Park as the location of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's 1565 settlement of St. Augustine, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in North America. The park currently exhibits native and colonial artifacts to celebrate Ponce de León and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the founder of St. Augustine. Exhibits of Timucua and Spanish heritage are also on display.

References

External links

Fountain of Youth – St. Augustine, Florida
Memoir of Hernando D'Escalante Fontaneda
Article on the Fountain of Youth
Article on Al-Khidr and the Water of Life
Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean