ollege, for obliging aid in
consulting books and papers.

HUGUENOTS IN FLORIDA.

CHAPTER I.

1512-1561.

EARLY SPANISH ADVENTURE.

Towards 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 zeal 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 surprising 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. [1] 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. [2]
Ponce de Leon found the island of Bimini, but not the fountain. Farther
westward, in the latitude of thirty degrees and eight minutes, he
approached an unknown land, which he named Florida, and, steering
southward, explored its coast as far as the extreme p