Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

Antonio de Herrera speaks not only of this Fountain of Youth but also of a river whose waters had likewise the marvelous property of restoring youth to old age. This river was also supposed to be in Florida. It was known as the Jordan and received quite as much attention from both Spaniards and Indians as did the Fountain of Youth.

Fonteneda, who spent seventeen years in the wilds of Florida, as a captive of the Indians, gives more explicit information about the subject than either Gomara or Herrera. “Juan Ponce de Leon,” he says, “believing the reports of the Indians of Cuba and San Domingo to be true, made an expedition into Florida to discover the river Jordan. This he did, either because he wished to acquire renown, or, perhaps, because he hoped to become young again by bathing in its waters. Many years ago a number of Cuban Indians went in search of this river, and entered the province of Carlos, but Sequene, the father of Carlos, took them prisoners and settled them in a village, where their descendants are still living. The news that these people had left their own country to bathe in the river Jordan spread among all the kings and chiefs of Florida, and, an they were an ignorant people, they set out in search of this river, which was supposed to possess the powers of rejuvenating old men and women. So eager were they in their search, that they did not pass a river, a brook, a lake, or even a swamp, without bathing in it, and even to this day they have not ceased to look for it, but always without success. The natives of Cuba, braving the dangers of the sea, became the victims of their faith, and thus it happened that they came to Carlos, where they built a village. They came in such great numbers that, although many have died, there are still many living there, both old and young. While I was a prisoner in those parts I bathed in a great many rivers but never found the right one.”[8]

The poet-historian, Juan de Castellanos, writing in mock heroic style, says that so great were the virtues of the Fountain of Youth, that by means of its waters old women were able to get rid of their wrinkles and gray hairs. “A few draughts of the water and a bath in the restoring fluid sufficed to restore strength to their enfeebled members, give beauty to their features, and impart to a faded complexion the glow of youth. And, considering the vanity of our times, I wonder how many old women would drag themselves to this saving wave, if the puerilities of which I speak were certainties. How rich and puissant would not be the king who should own such a fountain! What farms, jewels, and prized treasures would not men sell in order to become young again! And what cries of joy would not proceed from the women-folk—from the fair as well as from the homely! In what a variety of costumes and liveries would not all go to seek such favors! Certainly they would take greater pains than they would in making a visit to the Holy Land.”[9]

What Castellanos said might be repeated to-day. If the Fountain of Youth or the river Jordan, such as Ponce de Leon, Ayllon and de Soto sought, now existed, Florida would be the most frequented and most thickly populated country on the face of the globe. Vichy, Homburg, Karlsbad and other similar resorts would at once be abandoned, and there would forthwith be a mad rush for the Land of Easter. The Fountain of Youth would be worth more to its possessor than the diamond mines of Kimberley, more than the combined interests of Standard Oil, more than all the stocks and bonds of the United States Steel Corporation. There would be countless numbers who, like Faust, would be ready to sell their souls for a single draught of the life-giving fountain, for a single plunge into the health- and strength-restoring river.

That the simple and ignorant Indians of Cuba and Haiti and adjacent islands should have credited the stories in circulation about the marvelous waters said to exist somewhere in Florida we can understand. The marvelous and the supernatural always appeal in a special manner to the superstitious and untutored savage. We are, however, disposed to smile at the credulity of the enlightened Spaniard who did not hesitate to sacrifice fortune and life in the quest of what could never be found outside of Utopia. But, viewing things in our present state of knowledge, it is easy to judge them rashly and do them a grave injustice. We must transport ourselves back to the times in which they lived and acted, and consider the strange and novel environment in which they suddenly found themselves. A new world had just been discovered—a world in which everything—plants, trees, animals, men—seemed different from what they were familiar with in their own land. And for a people who from their youth had eagerly listened to stories of knight-errantry, and who, by long association with their Moorish neighbors, were ready to accept as sober facts the wildest statements of oriental fable, a special allowance must be made. They had heard of the adventures of Marco Polo, and of the wonders of Cathay and Cipango, and their minds were full of the oft-told tales about the Fortunate Isles, and the Islands of the Blest—located somewhere in the broad Atlantic, and presumably in the region of the setting sun—and what more natural than that they should expect to find themselves some bright morning in a land of enchantment? The marvelous stories current about the voyages of St. Brendan and his companions, about the island in the Western sea inhabited by Enoch and Elias, about the Garden of Eden moved from the distant East to the more distant West, all contributed to prepare their minds for a ready acceptance of the most extravagant statements. Had not the great Admiral, Columbus, announced that he had located the site of the Terrestrial Paradise, when he sailed by the rushing water of the Orinoco, and had not his views been accepted by thousands of his wondering contemporaries?

Such being the case, is it astonishing that the early explorers should have seriously believed in what we are now so ready to denounce as absurd? The romantic world of the sixteenth century, when Pliny and the Physiologus and the Bestiaries, were accepted by students of nature as unquestioned authorities; when learned men spent their lives in search of the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone, and believed in the transmutation of the baser metals into gold, was quite different from our prosaic twentieth-century world, when nothing is accepted that cannot pass the ordeal of exact science.

Again, we must not imagine, as is so often done, that a Fons Juventutis, such as Ponce de Leon and his contemporaries sought for, was something unheard of in the history of our race. Stories of miraculously healing fountains have been current from early times and in divers parts of the world—in India, in Ethiopia, and in the isles of the Pacific.

The reader will recall what Sir John Mandeville says about a well of youth he found during his travels in India. It was, he declares, “a right faire and a clere well, that hath a full good and sweete savoure, and it smelleth of all maner of sortes of spyces, and also at eche houre of the daye it changeth his savor diversely, and whoso drinketh thries on the daye of that well, he is made hole of all maner of sickenesse that he hathe. I have sometime dronke of that well and me thinketh yet that I fare the better; some call it the well of youth, for they that drinke thereof seme to be yong alway, and live without great sicknesse, and they saye this, cometh from Paradise terrestre, for it is so vertuous.”[10]

So writes Mandeville, but there is reason to believe that he cribbed this account of the Fountain of Youth from a medieval legend of Prester John, from which, on account of the interest that attaches to the subject, I select the following paragraph:—

“Item aboute this passage is a fonteyne or a conduyte so who of this watere drinked, IIJ. tymes he shall waxe yonge and also yf a man haue had a sykenes, XXX. yere and drynked of thys same water he shall therof be hole and sonde. And also as a man thereof drinked hym semeth that he had occupyed the beste mete and drinke of the worlde, and this same fonteyne is full of the grace of the holy goost, and who sowe in this same water wasshed his body he shall become yonge of XXX. yere.”[11]