“We know Menéndez landed here,” said Michelle. “There’s no dispute about that. Well, not much dispute about that. As far as Ponce goes, nobody else has any evidence that he landed anywhere else in the state either, so the Frasers’ attitude is that until someone else comes up with convincing evidence that he was not here, we’re going to continue believing that he was.”
“The Frasers own this place?”
“That’s right.”
“And when did Menéndez arrive?”
“In 1565. Ponce was here in 1513.”
“And they both landed exactly here?”
“Somewhere here—this property is fifteen acres,” she said.
I took a closer look at the bronze sign under the statue: “On Easter Sunday, March 27th, Ponce de León sighted this land and named it ‘Florida.’ On April 3rd, 1513, he entered the harbor and landed in this vicinity.”
“That’s true, you know,” said Michelle. “Well, it’s quite possibly true. It’s corroborated by an old priest’s diary.”
“What would historians say about this sign?”
“Depends on the historian. See, history is evolving, and as we find more documents, we keep learning more. I’d hate to say definitely because next week it could change and I’d have egg on my face. I’d like to say we do a pretty convincing job here, with our evidence such as it is.”
Empathizing with her situation, I wanted to stop being an accountant of facts, but couldn’t help persisting. “It says that he was in St. Augustine without any doubts.”
“He was here, and that’s what the Frasers want to believe, so that’s what I say, too. So say I.”
Michelle’s cell phone rang. She put on her Bluetooth. “Were you able to get an Indian?” she asked, before quickly ending the call. “Sorry about that—I’m looking for an actor to do a reenactment this afternoon. Everybody’s calling in sick today. Where were we? Ponce. Yes, we do get into some arguments with historians who are convinced he did not land here. You could go to the historical archives of St. Augustine and see what you turn up. But the information on these signs is right on.”
We looked at another plaque together. It quoted fragments from some nonattributed historical document and used ellipses for a heightened aesthetic authenticity. “Juan Ponce de León went to discover . . . He went in search of that fabulous fountain . . . That the Indians said turned old men young.”
Michelle then told me a long story about how some Indians in Cuba told Ponce about the fountain in order to get rid of him. “They said, ‘Hey, little guy, go get that water, and you’ll even be able to bring back some tall slaves in your big ships.’ And of course Ponce believed it because he wanted to believe it,” she said, emphasizing the last words as though that were the moral of my visit.
You just need to want to believe, she was saying, to have faith.
* * *
Michelle had to go to a meeting, but not before signing me up for the guided tour beginning in half an hour. In the meantime, I decide to research the fountain’s history in the Spanish Gift Shop.
A bored attendant named Jill1 was flipping through a book about dream catchers. She directed me to a photocopied booklet called The First Landing Place of Juan Ponce de León. The contents were written in overly footnoted, academic-sounding prose intended to lend an aura of credibility. The narrative described how, in 1900, a few years after buying the property, Dr. Louella Day McConnell made her “scientific discovery.”
First Diamond Lil found the cross. Subsequent excavations yielded a small silver saltcellar containing a parchment. This document, which Lil had translated by a local Spanish-speaking public-school teacher, supposedly told of Ponce’s 1513 discovery of a “fountain good and sweet to the taste.” There was no way of verifying it: the photocopy of the parchment in the book was utterly illegible. It looked like a Rorschach blot photocopied onto crumpled black carbon paper.
“From internal evidence the document could have been written only between the years 1506 and 1516,” concluded the book, citing Dr. McConnell’s professional training and her extensive investigations in the General Archives of the Indies.
I walked over to the shopkeeper and asked her where they kept the parchment and the silver saltcellar.
“We have a pewter replica of the saltshaker on display, but nobody knows where the original is anymore,” Jill said. “Maybe the owners have it somewhere? I think Diamond Lil lost it.”
“What about the parchment?”
“The parchment is in a safety-deposit box. The Frasers are the only people who’ve seen it. Apparently it’s written on sheepskin.”
“So neither of them are available for viewing?”
“Nah, sorry. I keep telling ’em they should at least have a photo of the darned parchment up on the wall.”
Mounds of trinkets were for sale near the checkout counter, including key chains, place mats, and mugs that said DRINK FROM THE FAMOUS FOUNTAIN IMMORTALIZED BY PONCE DE LEÓN. That seemed hazy enough, but then I came across a postcard claiming that this very spot “is where Ponce came ashore to landmark and record for all time, the first moment of our nation’s history, the discovery of North America.”
“Is there any proof that Ponce actually made it here?” I asked Jill, still trying to piece together what had actually happened.
“We think he may have. We believe he did.” She handed me another brochure that described this land as the very property on which US history began. “Whether you believe it or not, it’s interesting stuff, right?”
I picked up a small glass bottle full of Fountain of Youth WaterTM. Water from the Fountain of Youth, the label said, is considerably different from that of the wells. Jill told me that the Frasers owned the patent for Fountain of Youth Water. “You can’t bottle Fountain of Youth Water or the Frasers’ lawyer will come after you.”
On cue, a managerial type strolled into the shop. He introduced himself as Brian Fraser, grandson of Walter B. Fraser, the entrepreneur who had taken over the Fountain of Youth after Diamond Lil died in a car crash in 1929.
“There are twenty-five thousand patents attached to the phrase fountain of youth so we copyrighted ‘Ponce de León Fountain of Youth Water,’” said Brian, handing me a business card. He was the operations manager of the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park and a sales associate for Colonial Saint Augustine Travel.
“Give him your other business card,” gibed Jill.
He rolled his eyes and shook his head indignantly.
“Do you have several business cards?” I asked.
“I only have one Jill,” he answered, glaring at her. “She’s the highlight of my day, every day.”
And that was that. He walked out, leaving the business-card issue as unresolved as my understanding of Florida’s Fountain of Youth.
* * *
“It all began out there over 495 years ago,” said the twentysomething guide in a baseball cap. I was back in the springhouse, alongside seven or eight other visitors to the fountain. “The year: 1513. The first steps taken in North America happened right here on April second. Spanish discoverers docked out there on the First Coast and called this land Florida—the flower.”
Aspects of what he was saying were true. The oldest continually inhabited European settlement in the continental United States is indubitably in St. Augustine. But the first European steps in North America were those of the Norse Vikings a thousand years ago. And John Cabot made his discoveries in 1497.
The more the guide spoke, the more ridiculous it all seemed. I’d been dubious from the outset, but now I was just along for the ride. “Good old Juan came here to find the fountain of youth—this very fountain. After he drank from the spring, he doubled his expected life span and lived to be sixty-one. We can measure Ponce—he’s buried in the cathedral on San Juan, so we know he’s four foot eleven inches, and that’s confirmed. It’s not an exaggeration. It’s true.” The crowd looked on transfixed. A bald man’s eyebrows seemed to be climbing up over his
head like two millipedes.
Among the clippings on the wall was a pixelated shot of Helen Keller being driven around the property. A newspaper story related how, in December 1995, Gregory Peck pulled up in a limousine, got out, took a sip, and left immediately afterward.
“How do we know this is the right spot?” the guide asked. “This cross right over here! This property’s former owner Diamond Lil found it buried under three feet of dirt. She had been digging up a dead palm when she found the stone cross.”
“But that could have been done whenever,” a child piped up.
The tour guide ignored him. “But anyways, there are thirteen stones in a row, and laid across them are another fifteen stones, just like the year 1513. They’re laid perfectly from north to south and from east to west. La Cruz, the Cross, is how they referred to this area. But that’s not all: Diamond Lil had more proof that she had found that fountain of youth. She dug up an egg-shaped, silver saltcellar that contained a parchment. It was a sworn affidavit signed by the king’s witness offering hard evidence that this is the fountain Ponce found.”
“Wow,” whistled a curly-haired woman with a pink backpack, without irony, it seemed to me.
“The salt holder vanished mysteriously,” continued the guide, “but you can see a replica over there. More importantly, we’re all standing in what would have been a pond . . . the fountain. Everyone expects a bubbling spring, but the water levels dropped when people dug wells into the aquifer. It used to bubble out of the ground, spurting out to create a chest-deep pond for thousands of years. By 1875, the boil stopped bubbling and the pond disappeared. Now we have a pump—so we can turn the Fountain of Youth on or off whenever we want. Come on down, people, grab a cool glass of the Fountain of Youth, and check it out while you’re here. Don’t worry ’bout falling in. And if people drop their sunglasses in, I can fish ’em out with a swimming-pool net.”
The group shuffled over to try their dentist’s-cup shots of water. A boy grimaced and washed it down with a gulp of Sprite. Not needing another taste, I headed outside.
Inside a domed building nearby, an attendant was just getting ready to start the Celestial Planetarium show. He came out to say a few words. “Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the only manually operated planetarium in the world. It’s a sometimes-working antique, so if there’s smoke and sparks coming out of it, don’t panic—that’s normal at our planetarium.”
The lights went down and the crazy old machine sputtered to life. It started rotating and groaning, the cosmic apparatuses blossoming out of a central steel pot like mechanical flowers. “A 1957 Chevrolet’s ball bearings and a Singer sewing machine are what turn this thing,” said the attendant, speaking through a microphone. Hexagonal lamps covered in perforated sheets projected lights on the ceiling resembling constellations—sort of. “These were the stars that guided Ponce de León as he searched for the fountain of youth,” explained the host. “You are now under the exact night sky that Ponce saw when he made North America’s discovery.” I loved that he called it the exact night sky and loved it even more when he started the strobe show, which consisted of his turning a handheld flashlight on and off. Then the machine broke. He kept the flashlight on, punched some buttons, and soon the contraption started up again, casting its shadowy, strobe-spiced spectacle onto the circular ceiling.
A small theater next door was called the Explorer’s Discovery Globe. A few rows of seats were set up in front of a big, two-story-high globe in the center of the room. Black lights came on and the orb started glowing in the dark. A sonorous baritone voice intoned facts about Spain’s discovery of the New World. The recording told of how, in the beginning, the earth was without form and void: “There was a multicolored planet radiating its own subdued brilliance as it rotated through the cosmos. Then the western hemisphere arose.” When America was discovered, civilization really kicked into high gear. “Florida is synonymous with the Fountain of Youth,” the voice stated. “And the name Florida was later changed to the United States of America.”
As I walked out, a lanky, somewhat melancholy man approached and introduced himself as Harry Metz, the amateur archaeologist Michelle Reyna had told me about.
“Did you like the show?” he asked. “They’re going to be putting a computer in the planetarium soon to have it programmed by astrologers—I mean, astronomers,” he said. Given what I’d seen so far, the distinction’s porousness felt perfectly site-appropriate.
Metz walked me through the small museum next door. The star attraction was a small boat billed as a replica of Columbus’s famed ship.
“That’s not really a replica of La Niña, is it?” I asked.
“Not technically. It’s actually a small shrimping skipper.”
On the wall was a display about the cadavers of prehistoric dogs that had been found on the site. Radiocarbon dating showed them to be eight hundred years old. When they were disinterred, their stomachs contained the remains of deer hooves and catfish. “I want to put a dog skeleton on display, one of the dog skeletons we dug up,” Metz said. “I’d like to flesh the skull so that visitors would be able to see what a real Indian dog looked like.”
The next room was devoted to the Native Americans who’d inhabited this land prior to the arrival of Europeans. There were paintings of scalps hanging as trophies, dripping blood. The room’s centerpiece was a large photo of skeletons, eye sockets glowing. “This is where they found the skeletal remains of Indians who had been given Christian burials,” said Metz. The lurid, oversize photo of bones piled alongside skulls grinning hideously looked like a Misfits LP cover.
A framed letter on the wall was from M. W. Stirling, director of the Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, on June 1, 1951. It stated that if people “undertake further excavations of the site, they will find it to be of more than ordinary significance.” Metz told me that he’d done numerous excavations himself, but that legitimate archaeological digs were overseen by Dr. Kathleen Deagan from the University of Florida. As bogus as most of the displays had been thus far, Deagan had made numerous non-fountain-of-youth-related finds on these grounds. “It’s always been interesting and ironic that the site is, in fact, one of the most important historical sites in Florida,” she told National Geographic. Her digs revealed, with certainty, that this area was at one point a Timucua Indian village called Seloy. Metz volunteered on some of the official digs and told me he’d been allowed to keep some of his discoveries. “Would you like to see some of the artifacts I’ve found?” he asked. “They’re in my lab, or my cave, as I like to call it.”
He brought me behind the planetarium to a small storage area. The shelves were lined with his finds: pottery shards he had washed in his dishwasher, crumpled pop cans, whelk shells, horseshoes, a number of pipes, a doll’s head, and musket balls. He hoped to one day bulldoze under the planetarium. “I’m convinced there are things in the ground from when Ponce landed here, and I say here because I think it could have happened.”
“So you believe Ponce de León really was here?” I asked.
“I don’t want to tick anybody off, but it looks to me like he very well could have been here.” He started speaking about the conjugate graticule, the geographic-coordinate system that shows that Ponce’s ships arrived at latitude thirty. Each latitude being sixty nautical miles, he reasoned, the landing probably happened somewhere within thirty nautical miles. “Ponce will always remain controversial. Naysayers think he couldn’t have landed here, but it all could be—y’know? Look at the Indian burials—they’re not phony,” he argued, as though that proved the validity of everything else by proxy.
He then told me a convoluted story about Ponce de León’s possible reasons for coming. It had something to do with the lunatic daughter of Ferdinand’s, named Joanna, who kept her dead husband’s corpse, dressed it, spoke to it, and ate dinner with it. “Isabella and Ferdinand were hoping for an heir to prolong the bloodline,” said Metz. “Physicians were feeding him potions
to keep him alive, but they were making him sick. They thought maybe the fountain would help him out.”
* * *
St. Augustine’s historical archives are housed on the second floor of a building near the center of town. Its filing cabinets are filled with disputes relating to Ponce and the fountain, going back to where he actually landed. There are numerous passionate arguments on behalf of various latitudinal and longitudinal positions, but no way of knowing where it happened with unassailable certainty. “Once you’ve got that one figured out, you can sift through the trial transcripts about whether the Fountain of Youth is real or not,” the librarian told me, thumping a half dozen crates onto the table.
People have always claimed that its water is plain old well water. A decades-old report from Harper’s magazine called it “horrible tepid water drawn from . . . a very dubious source.” Tepid, yes, but a certificate from a bacterial analysis in Gainesville found the water to contain absolutely no traces of fecal streptococci. In 1978, a St. Augustine centenarian,2 Allen Stowball, who attributed his longevity to meat, coffee, and pineapple juice, told journalists that he’d been to the Fountain of Youth twice—only to make deliveries. “No, I didn’t drink any of that water,” he said. “That water’s all a bluff.”
The St. Augustine Historical Society stated it explicitly in 1929: “There is no fountain of youth as we all know, and it is silly and quacky to carry on the inventions of a woman who was not in her right mind.” Document after document expounded on the fountain’s complete lack of historical standing among scholars. A National Historical Committee in the 1930s judged that none of the spring’s claims were factual.
Charles B. Reynolds, of the Audubon Society, was one of the most tireless debunkers of the Fountain of Youth. “It being a well, to speak or to write of it as a spring is to violate the truth and to deceive,” he wrote. His pamphlet “Give Back the Lost Dignity to Historical St. Augustine” deemed the cross dug up by Louella Day—the single piece of evidence that the Frasers could provide—a hoax and a “flim-flam proposition.”
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