eal] them as they be
seke [sick].

[1] The volume from which this passage is taken was first printed
in Antwerp as a compilation with additions based on the letters of
Americus Vespucius. It is included by Edward Arber in his "First
Three English Books on America." The author's name is unknown.

THE DISCOVERY OF FLORIDA BY PONCE DE LEON

(1512)

PARKMAN'S ACCOUNT[1]

Toward the close of the fifteenth century Spain achieved her final
triumph over the infidels of Granada, and made her name glorious
through all generations by the discovery of America. The religious zea
and romantic daring which a long course of Moorish wars had called
forth were now exalted to redoubled fervor. Every ship from the New
World came freighted with marvels which put the fictions of chivalry
to shame; and to the Spaniard of that day America was a region of
wonder and mystery, of vague and magnificent promise. Thither
adventurers hastened, thirsting for glory and for gold, and often
mingling the enthusiasm of the crusader and the valor of the
knight-errant with the bigotry of inquisitors and the rapacity of
pirates. They roamed over land and sea; they climbed unknown
mountains, surveyed unknown oceans, pierced the sultry intricacies of
tropical forests; while from year to year and from day to day new
wonders were unfolded, new islands and archipelagoes, new regions of
gold and pearl, and barbaric empires of more than Oriental wealth. The
extravagance of hope and the fever of adventure knew no bounds. Nor is
it surprizing that amid such waking marvels the imagination should run
wild in romantic dreams; that between the possible and the impossible
the line of distinction should be but faintly drawn, and that men
should be found ready to stake life and honor in pursuit of the most
insane fantasies.

Such a man was the veteran cavalier Juan Ponce de Leon. Greedy of
honors and of riches, he embarked at Porto Rico with three
brigantines, bent on schemes of discovery. But that which gave the
chief stimulus to his enterprise was a story, current among the
Indians of Cuba and Hispaniola, that on the island of Bimini, said to
be one of the Bahamas, there was a fountain of such virtue, that,
bathing in its waters, old men resumed their youth.[2] It was said,
moreover, that on a neighboring shore might be found a river gifted
with the same beneficent property, and believed by some to be no other
than the Jordan. Ponce de Leon