[902] Historia general (1535), part i. lib. xix. cap. 15, p. clxii.
[903] [The Peter-Martyr map (1511) represents a land called Bimini (“illa de Beimeni”—see ante p. 110) in the relative position of Florida. The fountain of perpetual youth, the search for which was a part of the motive of many of these early expeditions, was often supposed to exist in Bimini; but official documents make no allusion to the idle story. Dr. D. G. Brinton (Floridian Peninsula, p. 99) has collected the varying statements as to the position of this fountain.—Ed.]
[904] Oviedo, Madrid (1850), lib. xvi. cap. 11, vol. i. p. 482.
[905] Primera y segunda parte de la historia general de las Indias (1553), cap. 45, folio xxiii.
[906] Dos libros de cosmografia (Milan, 1556), p. 192.
[907] Bernal Diaz, Historic verdadera (1632).
[908] Cabeça de Vaca, Washington, 1851. [It is also sketched ante, p. 218.—Ed.]
[909] De insulis nuper inventis (Cologne, 1574), p. 349.
[910] Ensayo cronológico para la historia general de la Florida, por Don Gabriel de Cardenas y Cano [anagram for Don Andres Gonzales Barcia], Madrid, 1723. [He includes under the word “Florida” the adjacent islands as well as the main. Joseph de Salazars’ Crísis del ensayo cronológico (1725) is merely a literary review of Barcia’s rhetorical defects. Cf. Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula, p. 51.—Ed.]
[911] Barcia, in the Introduccion a el Ensayo cronológico, pp. 26, 27, discusses the date of Ponce de Leon’s discovery. He refutes Remesal, Ayeta, and Moreri, who gave 1510, and adopts the date 1512 as given by the “safest historians,” declaring that Ponce de Leon went to Spain in 1513. The date 1512 was adopted by Hakluyt, George Bancroft, and Irving; but after Peschel in his Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen called attention to the fact that Easter Sunday in 1512 did not fall on March 27, the date given by Herrera, without mentioning the year, but that it did fall on that day in 1513, Kohl (Discovery of Maine, p. 240), George Bancroft, in later editions, and others adopted 1513, without any positive evidence. But 1512 is nevertheless clung to by Gravier in his “Route du Mississippi” (Congrès des Américanistes, 1878, i. 238), by Shipp in his De Soto and Florida, and by H. H. Bancroft in his Central America (vol. i. p. 128). Mr. Deane, in a note to Hakluyt’s use of 1512 in the Westerne Planting (p. 230), says the mistake probably occurred “by not noting the variation which prevailed in the mode of reckoning time.” The documents cited in chapter iv. settle the point. The Capitulacion under which Ponce de Leon sailed, was issued at Burgos, Feb. 23, 1512. He could not possibly by March 27 have returned to Porto Rico, equipped a vessel, and reached Florida. The letters of the King to Ceron and Diaz, in August and December 1512, show that Ponce de Leon, after returning to Porto Rico, was prevented from sailing, and was otherwise employed. The letter written by the King to the authorities in Española, July 4, 1513, shows that he had received from them information that Ponce de Leon had sailed in that year.