Not a Drop to Drink: The Fountain of Youth and the Quest for Eternal Life

Not a Drop to Drink: ENDNOTES The Fountain of Youth and the Quest for Eternal Life

Where there were the old, the sick, and the dying, so too was there the myth of powerful water which could restore to health anyone who drank it. The lure of eternal life is a theme carried forward through works of literature and mythical tales, evolving and changing over the centuries.1 By the Middle Ages, the notion of magical rejuvenation took the form of water collected in a fountain, springing up throughout Eurasian mythologies.2

The Fountain of Youth bears connections to Indigenous and European legends, carrying throughout the continents on both sides of the Atlantic. By the sixteenth century, the myth of restorative waters had found its connections in the Americas through the account of the Spanish historian, Peter Martyr. Martyr claimed to have encountered a slave whose father had bathed in magical water in the Florida region.3 As a result, the claim was made that there was a discovery of a spring with magical properties in the Bahamas.4 One author in the 1300s, who went by the name of John Mandeville, offered an account of its discovery, though more fictionalized than factual. Briefly he provides a description of a supposed fountain discovered near a city called Polombe.5 Mandeville writes of the “well” at the base of a mountain from which “they that dwell there…never have sickness; and they seem always young.”6 As Mandeville’s and Martyr’s accounts drew focus to the Americas as a location for the legendary fountain, the drive for exploration of the Atlantic briefly shifted for those who sought eternal life rather than gold.7

Along with accounts of the Fountain of Youth came explorers seeking to obtain its restorative properties in the mysterious regions of the Americas. These explorers included Antonio de Herrera and, as commonly believed, Juan Ponce de León.8 Herrera insisted what many

scholars later believed: that Ponce de León sought out the fountain for the same reasons as other explorers—he wished to have his youth restored. He wrote a vague account of Ponce de Leon’s first expedition to Florida and details his “search for the sacred fountain...and the river whose water rejuvenated the aged.”9 The connection between Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth resulted from misconceptions of his exploration in Florida, while historians, contemporary and modern, assume the validity of his search to be a sure possibility.10 The search in Florida led Herrera to Bimini in the 1500s, an island in the Bahamas where his expedition came to a halt.11 Christopher Columbus reflected on Ponce de Leon’s alleged search for and failure to find the “terrestrial paradise.” Eventually de Leon gave up and settled to rule the land instead.12 As these explorers searched for the mythic fountain in the Americas, the mythologies of Eurasia and the Indigenous peoples of South America interacted, demonstrating the lure of similar tales and folklore. While there are no records on any Indigenous contemporaries in the sixteenth century who searched for the fountain, Maori mythology refers to the power of water in relation to medicine and the power of deities. Though no exact fountain may bear any connection between myths, the common reference to the powerful properties of water in a spring—perhaps the lake of Bimini—demonstrate the conception of the supernatural in different cultures.13

Thus, the myth of the Fountain of Youth relates not only to Eurasian folklore but also Indigenous tales of rejuvenating waters.14 As Maori mythology alludes to powerful water which could cure sickness, and even bring back the dead, the search for such a spring with restorative properties brought explorers to America in search of the impossible.15 From the influence of stories about eternal waters told from the mythologies of Asia and the Middle East, the connections made to mythologies in the Atlantic world were brought to light as a result of the quest for the Fountain of Youth.

“Ponce De Leon in Florida” by Thomas Moran (1877-78), Wikimedia Commons.

Jessica Knapp English major, History minor