Twenty Days Afterwards, Juan Ponce Returned To Porto Rico, And Not Long Afterwards The Ship Returned There Which He Had Sent To Bimini, But Without Discovering The Famous Spring.

Ortubia reported that the island was large, and pleasantly diversified with hills, plains, and meadows, having many rivers and delightful groves[2].

Besides his main design of making discoveries, which all Spaniards then aspired to, Ponce was eager to find out the spring of Bimini, and a certain river in Florida, both of which were affirmed by the Indians of Cuba to have the property of turning old people young by bathing in their waters. Some time before the arrival of the Spaniards, many Indians were so thoroughly convinced of the reality of such a river, that they went over to Florida, where they built a town, and their descendants still continue there. This report prevailed so universally among the caciques in these parts, that there was not a brook in all Florida, nay scarcely a lake or puddle, that they had not bathed in; and some still ignorantly persist in believing that this virtue resides in the river now called Jordan, at Cape Santa Helena, forgetting that the Spaniards first gave it this name in 1520, when they discovered the country of Chicora.

Though this voyage of Ponce de Leon turned out to no account to him, it gave him encouragement to go to court to seek a reward for the countries he had discovered, which he believed to be all islands, and not the continent, as it afterwards turned out.

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