by Tony Horwitz
“Youth water?” a guide asked, offering me a plastic cup as I crowded into an enclosure called the spring house. The sulfurous water came from a well built over the spring. “When Ponce landed it was an overflowing pond,” the guide said, pointing to a diorama with “life-sized” figures of the conquistador and Indians beside a pool of water. “The chief you see there was seven foot two and Ponce was four foot eleven. And that was in his boots and helmet.”
Then he directed our attention to a stone cross on the ground, “left here by Ponce de León.” It was fifteen stones long and thirteen across, signifying 1513, the year the conquistador landed. The guide also showed us a replica of an ancient silver saltcellar that had been found nearby, with a bit of parchment inside telling of Ponce de León’s discovery of the fountain.
“I’m feeling younger already,” quipped the woman beside me, holding up her cup. “I’m back in middle school history class!”
The source for most of this “history” was an eccentric Victorian, Louella Day McConnell, who opened the fountain park as a tourist attraction in the early 1900s, around the time she found the cross and saltcellar. At the St. Augustine Historical Society, I’d read a study that carefully debunked her many claims. It cited, among other things, an affidavit stating that the “fountain” dated only to 1875. The cross was made from a type of stone that didn’t exist in sixteenth-century St. Augustine. The original saltcellar, since vanished, was decorated with an Indian wearing a nineteenth-century Plains headdress.
All this was well known to local experts on St. Augustine history. But none were willing to publicly contradict the fountain myth, since the family that owned the park and other historic attractions had sued detractors. So visitors kept sipping the fountain’s water, hearing tales about stone crosses and seven-foot Indians, learning from a planetarium show at the park that Columbus sailed around “a world that had not yet been proved round,” and stopping on the way out at Don Juan’s Gift Shop to buy Fountain of Youth shot glasses and bottles of the elixir.
This might all have been harmless fun, were it not for the school groups and the site’s genuine and much grimmer history. The guided tour ended at the planetarium, leaving visitors to wander the park grounds, a lovely expanse of moss-draped trees, ducks and ostriches, assorted statues and cannons, and at the back, an enclosure labeled “Timucuan Indian Burial Grounds.”
Three decades after Louella Day McConnell “discovered” the cross and saltcellar, bones turned up on the property. Archaeologists later uncovered a large Indian village, adjoining Pedro Menéndez’s first camp at St. Augustine and a mission built by the Spanish. Among the many graves were those of some of the first Indians in North America interred as Christians, arms crossed on their chests and graves empty of the tools and ornaments often found in precontact burials.
Early Europeans wrote that Florida’s Timucuan Indians were not only tall and powerfully built, but exceptionally long-lived; the French credulously recorded that some were 250 years old. But Spanish mission life brought disease, forced labor, and other ills. By the mid-1700s, only a few Timucuans remained.
An exhibit by the burial ground gave an unflinching account of this tragedy. But it was a decidedly secondary attraction for visitors, most of whom came for the waters and merrily ingested the fiction of a fountain of youth, beside a graveyard for Indians who perished prematurely as a result of European contact.
“It’s sad and kind of sick, having one almost on top of the other,” a park guide said, when I approached him during his break outside the spring house. “But no one seems to care.”
Chris Meier was a twenty-year-old with a buzz cut who had come to work in St. Augustine because he loved history. Unfortunately for his job prospects, he possessed a hatred of phoniness to rival Holden Caulfield’s.
“I work for a living telling lies,” Chris said, “and what’s worse, people believe me.” Some visitors didn’t just drink the youth water; they washed in it. And few questioned the canned history he delivered, except to ask, “Did Columbus land here, too, and drink from the fountain?” or “I thought the Pilgrims discovered America.”
Chris was looking for another job in town. But he despaired of finding one that would let him tell a narrative truer to Florida’s founding. “Ponce de León came for gold and slaves, not a fountain,” he said. “Pedro Menéndez killed all the French except musicians for his private orchestra. How twisted is that?” Chris’s face wrinkled in disgust. “These guys were psychopathic nutballs. Celebrating them is like idolizing Charles Manson.”
A trolley tinkled up to the park gate, disgorging a new crowd of visitors. Chris went back in the spring house to fill plastic cups.
“Youth water, anyone?”
IF PONCE DE León was the mythical founder of St. Augustine, the true one was honored next door to the Fountain of Youth, at the Mission Nombre de Dios, or Name of God. This was believed to be the site of Menéndez’s landing on September 8, 1565, and served as the venue for St. Augustine’s annual commemoration of the Spanish arrival. Usually, the ceremony occurred in September, on the anniversary of the landing, but a hurricane had delayed it until mid-November.
The mission occupied a grassy shoreline, with an outdoor altar and a towering cross by the water. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the anniversary was a local event, sponsored by the city and the Catholic Church, rather than a tourist function. I was also surprised to find Lyn Corley, my evangelical guide in Jacksonville, who despite her view of St. Augustine as “enemy territory” had come to see the ceremony with a friend.
“Is there a Protestant section?” Lyn quipped, as a hundred or so people took seats by the outdoor altar.
“Yeah, back there,” her friend replied, pointing at a nearby cemetery.
The ceremony opened with Spanish reenactors rowing ashore a bald, heavyset man wearing a black cape and playing the part of Menéndez. Reaching shore, they raised a flag and shouted, “¡Viva Menéndez! ¡Viva España!” A priest held out a cross for the conquistador to kiss, and a narrator explained that the man playing Menéndez was a thirteenth-generation native of St. Augustine and charter member of the Los Floridanos Society, a group of Spanish descendants.
“And he’s proud of that?” Lyn hissed.
St. Augustine’s mayor formally proclaimed the anniversary of the city’s founding and a local historian delivered a short address. “The children who stepped ashore here would have their own grandchildren by the time Jamestown was settled,” she observed. “Here was the first European town in North America, the place where Christianity began in our nation.”
None of the speakers mentioned the slaughter of the French. But Lyn perked up when the historian noted that for six years the Spanish relocated to nearby Anastasia Island, before returning to the city’s present site. “Hear that?” Lyn whispered to her friend. “This was not a permanent settlement.” Then, as the mass began, the two left their seats and moved to a bench in the graveyard.
After communion, the priest invited the audience to share birthday cake with St. Augustine’s “royal family.” This referred to three people in royal attire who, like the honorary Menéndez, belonged to the Los Floridanos Society. “We’re an elite group of Spanish who have always been here,” one of the society’s members explained.
Like so much in St. Augustine, this claim required a certain sleight of history. In 1763, when Britain briefly won control of Florida, all but three Spanish families in St. Augustine fled to Cuba. The city was later repopulated by hundreds of refugees from a failed plantation that had imported laborers from Greece, Italy, and the island of Minorca. This mixed group—known collectively as Minorcans—grew into the non-Anglo population of St. Augustine.
“In real life I’m a licensed massage therapist and think of myself as Minorcan,” said Missy Hall, a royal family member wearing white gloves and a trailing gown. “But for today I’m Queen Mariana of Spain.”
She was escorted by a teenaged girl wearing a dress made from d
rapery and a sullen adolescent boy clad in knee breeches and stockings. “My mom made me do this,” he confided. “She takes this seriously.” He straightened his crown, on order from the queen. “Today I have two moms, my real one and the queen. A great day. Just great.”
Adding to his mortification was the role he’d been assigned to play. The woman who had started the tradition of dressing as Spanish royalty wanted to reenact a family like her own, with a mother and two teenaged children. The only historical family that matched was that of Queen Mariana, a late-seventeenth-century regent to her young son King Carlos II. Unfortunately, the family was inbred and Carlos, known as El Hechizado (the Bewitched), was mentally handicapped and had a jaw so deformed that he couldn’t chew or speak properly.
“We’re not supposed to tell people,” the modern Carlos said, “but I’m a drooling retard.” A band struck up “Happy Birthday” and he drew his sword to cut a giant cake decorated with the crest of St. Augustine. As he returned to his “throne,” the queen told him to sit up straight. “A retard with two moms,” he moaned. “Great day. Just great.”
THE NEXT DAY I went to see the very different historical pageant held at Lyn Corley’s church in Jacksonville. At King of Kings, the congregants were casually dressed and called out joyously as the pastor roamed the room, speaking through a Madonna-style headset.
“God is incorruptible, isn’t that good news? Oh, that’s so good!” he shouted, to loud amens. “This is the great joy, to know that someday we will be delivered from this world of sin. God, Mr. Big, the Creator, says it will all work out in the end.”
Then the kids took over. Homeschooled under the direction of the church, they’d prepared a play based on the historical material Lyn had gathered. “It’s a story of religious freedom,” said a teacher acting as narrator. Adopting a French accent, she spoke about the Huguenots while a group of children in homemade costumes dragged cardboard boats past a bedsheet painted ocean blue.
“The world was Catholic, and if you were a Protestant trying to worship God in Europe, you were under persecution,” the narrator intoned. As she told of the French voyages, the children brought out a cardboard fort and shook hands with Indians, played by black children from the congregation dressed in skirts stuck with moss. Then the children sang psalms together.
This happy scene was interrupted by the Spanish, sent by King Philip “because the Pope had decreed that Spain was entitled to everything.” Children clad in black rushed in, waving plastic swords. The two sides fought lustily before the French fell down. Then the story moved to the slaughter at Matanzas.
“Menéndez gave Ribault and his men the chance to recant, but they chose to die rather than renounce the God they loved.” As the children playing the French kneeled and recited a psalm, the Spanish ran them through with their plastic swords. “At Matanzas lies the blood of Jean Ribault and his men,” the narrator concluded. “Blood has a voice, and the voice is one of freedom in Jesus Christ.”
Lyn glowed as the congregation burst into applause. “Wouldn’t it be great,” she said, “if we could perform that in St. Augustine?”
AFTER WATCHING THE dueling ceremonies, I decided to leave the wars of religion behind and investigate a more secular controversy. The figure at its center was Michael Gannon, whom I went to see at his home in Gainesville. A tall, stooped man in his late seventies, Gannon had an unusual résumé. He’d worked as a radio sportscaster, Coast Guardsman, war correspondent in Vietnam, priest of the diocese of St. Augustine, and official historian for the Catholic Church of Florida, before leaving the priesthood and becoming a professor of history at the University of Florida.
In 1985, just before Thanksgiving, Gannon got a call from a Florida reporter who was seeking a fresh angle for a holiday story. “I told him, ‘I know an old angle,’ ” Gannon recalled. While reading Spanish accounts of the landing at St. Augustine in 1565, he’d been struck by the mention of a thanksgiving mass, after which Menéndez “had the Indians fed and dined himself.” In other words, fifty-six years before the Pilgrim feast at Plymouth, the Spanish performed a similar ritual in St. Augustine.
The Spanish left no details of their meal, but Gannon made an educated guess, based on what he knew of sixteenth-century diet and the foods listed on Spanish ship manifests. “It was probably a stew called cocido—salt pork and garbanzo beans, laced with garlic,” he said, “accompanied by hard sea biscuits and red wine.” Gannon had also made a close study of Timucuans and believed their contributions to the meal would have included corn, venison, and tortoise.
Gannon’s comments to the reporter quickly hit the news wires and went national. “Was the First Turkey Really Salt Pork?” read a typical headline. Calls flooded in from across the country, particularly New England, where Gannon was dubbed “the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.” The historian didn’t flinch from the controversy; he stoked it. When a TV interviewer in Boston told him that Plymouth officials had called an emergency meeting to discuss his remarks, the professor coolly replied: “By the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.”
In the years since, Gannon had often replayed his role as Thanksgiving provocateur. But he cheerfully acknowledged that the fuss was much ado about little. Other Europeans in pre-Mayflower America had also marked their arrival by offering prayers of thanksgiving. Some may have celebrated the occasion by feasting with Indians. At best, St. Augustine’s thanksgiving was the first to occur at a permanent European settlement on the continent.
For Gannon, though, the controversy sparked by his remarks spoke to a more consequential lacuna in our memory of early America. “For too long Florida has been a finger of land remote from the national scene—not even a fly-over state, just a destination for beaches and Disney and all its satellite attractions,” he said. “Our history has not been treated seriously. There’s an inbred resistance in the powdered-wig states to accepting the primacy of Florida and St. Augustine in the story of America’s settlement.”
Gannon thought St. Augustine deserved some blame for this neglect, having misrepresented its own history and allowed Ponce de León to become “the creation myth of the city.” Gannon could still sing out the tagline of the radio station he’d worked for as a young announcer: “WFOY, Wonderful Fountain of Youth, 1240 on your dial!” He’d since urged the city to embrace its genuine history and require that tour guides be tested on their knowledge. “It’s taken a while,” he said, “but the city has finally realized that its true hero was Menéndez.”
Gannon was delightful company, a raconteur who debunked myths with erudition, wit, and the wonderfully resonant voice of a former priest and radio announcer. He even gave me a rendition of the Lord’s Prayer in Timucuan, as written down by an early Spanish priest. But when I questioned his characterization of Menéndez as a hero, citing the massacres of the French at Matanzas, the tone of our conversation changed.
“Menéndez had reason to kill them,” Gannon said. “He could hardly feed his own colony. And he had no means of guarding all those men. If he’d had AK-47s, he could do it, but not with swords and crossbows.”
What about La Caroline? I asked. Hadn’t Menéndez declared that he came to slaughter all the Protestants he found at the fort?
“That wasn’t an act of religious violence,” Gannon replied. “It was done in self-defense, to save his colony. Remember, it was the French who chased after Menéndez to St. Augustine with everything they had.”
Gannon also bristled at the notion that the Huguenots were religious martyrs, as Jacksonville’s evangelicals believed. “We don’t know that the French died for their faith,” he said. “They happened to be Calvinists, but Fort Caroline was a military bastion. It could have been a religious refuge, but I don’t think it was intended as one.”
In his view, the stirring religious story in Florida was what happened in St. Augustine. “It became the first mission base for spreading the faith and teaching European agriculture and craft and reading and writi
ng,” he said. “The Spanish did this not by forcing themselves on the Indians but by living among them as Peace Corps people do today. It was a great work of the human spirit.”
The “true martyrs,” he went on, weren’t French Huguenots; they were Spanish missionaries, many of whom were killed by Indians. “They could have lived a life of some ease, but came out here in the snakes and mosquitoes and heat to improve the lot of the natives, spiritually and materially. Indians got great yields from their harvests thereafter.”
This might have been so. But before long, there weren’t many Indians left to take in the harvest. Lacking beasts of burden, the Spanish pressed natives into service as porters, carrying heavy loads between missions. The crowding of mission life, and close contact with Europeans, also bred disease.
Again, Gannon saw these events differently. “If there was a health disadvantage for mission Indians, it was from relative inactivity and new foods,” he said. “Hunters and gatherers were fine physical specimens, but when they settled down they declined in bone size and strength.”
Quizzing Gannon, I started to feel like a stubborn undergraduate, trying to poke holes in a lecture by a distinguished professor. His spirited, almost missionary defense of the Spanish also confirmed the view I’d formed during my long travels in their wake, from the Caribbean to the Southwest to Florida. When it came to the Spanish, there was no middle ground. Black legend or white legend. Barbarous inquisitors or knightly bearers of Catholicism and civilization. For the first time I felt eager to move on, to the “powdered wig” story of Anglo-America.
Gannon’s phone rang, interrupting our debate. It was the week before Thanksgiving and the annual media circus had begun, with a call from a newspaper in Massachusetts.
“They wanted to know if I’d changed my views,” Gannon said, hanging up the phone. “I told them I can’t change what’s in the documents.”