When the Spaniards were exploring the West India archipelago a report became current that on one of the more northward islands there was a fountain, the water of which possessed extraordinary virtues. Peter Martyr heard the rumor, and wrote, in 1511, to the bishop of Rome, saying: “There is an island about three hundred and twenty-five leagues from Española, as they say who have searched for it, named Boiuca or Agnaneo, on which is a never-failing spring of running water of such marvelous efficacy that when the water is drunk, perhaps, with some attention to diet, it makes old people young again. And here I must beg your holiness not to think that this is said jestingly or thoughtlessly, for they have reported it everywhere as a fact, so that not only all the common people but also the educated and the wealthy believe it to be true.”[299] The island of Boiuca appears to be partly outlined on the small map in Peter Martyr’s “Legatio Babylonica,” printed at Seville in 1511. It is designated on the latter as a part of the island of Beimeni,—“Isla de beimeni parte.”[300] Among those who gave credence to the fiction of the marvellous virtues of the spring of Boiuca was Juan Ponce de Leon, a Spanish cavalier, who had attained considerable military fame in the West Indies.[301] He had sailed from Spain in 1493 to Española in one of the ships of Columbus’s second expedition. In 1509 he took part in the subjugation of the Island of Borriquen, afterward called Porto Rico, of which he was made governor. Beguiling himself with the hope that he could renew the vigor of his youth by bathing in the stream of life-giving water, and at the same time add honor to his name by becoming the discoverer of the island on which the fountain was said to be, Juan Ponce fitted out three vessels and sailed from the port of St. German, Porto Rico, on Thursday, the third of March, 1512, to search for the island Boiuca, which some called Bimini. “It is certain,” says Herrera, the Spanish historian, “that Juan Ponce de Leon besides intending to make new discoveries, as all the Spaniards at that time aspired to do, was also intent on finding the fountain of Bimini and a river in Florida; the Indians of Cuba and Española affirming that old people bathing themselves in them became young again, and it was a fact that many Indians of Cuba, firmly believing that there was such a stream, had found that island not long before the Spaniards, and had passed over to Florida in search of the river, and there built a town, where their descendants reside to this day. This report so affected all the princes and caciques in those parts that it was a hobby to find a river which wrought such a wonderful change as made old people young, so that there was not a river or a brook, scarcely a lake or a puddle, in all Florida, in which they did not bathe themselves.”[302]