THE ISLAND OF BIMINI

To the northward of Hispaniola lies the island of Bimini.  It may not be one of the spice islands, but it grows the best ginger to be found in the world.  In it is a fair city, and beside the city a lofty mountain, at the foot of which is a noble spring called the ‘Fons Juventutis’.  This fountain has a sweet savor, as of all manner of spicery, and every hour of the day the water changes its savor and its smell.  Whoever drinks of this well will be healed of whatever malady he has, and will seem always young.  It is not reported that women and men who drink of this fountain will be always young, but that they will seem so, and probably to themselves, which simply means, in our modern accuracy of language, that they will feel young.  This island has never been found.  Many voyages have been made in search of it in ships and in the imagination, and Liars have said they have landed on it and drunk of the water, but they never could guide any one else thither.  In the credulous centuries when these voyages were made, other islands were discovered, and a continent much more important than Bimini; but these discoveries were a disappointment, because they were not what the adventurers wanted.  They did not understand that they had found a new land in which the world should renew its youth and begin a new career.  In time the quest was given up, and men regarded it as one of the delusions which came to an end in the sixteenth century.  In our day no one has tried to reach Bimini except Heine.  Our scientific period has a proper contempt for all such superstitions.  We now know that the ‘Fons Juventutis’ is in every man, and that if actually juvenility cannot be renewed, the advance of age can be arrested and the waste of tissues be prevented, and an uncalculated length of earthly existence be secured, by the injection of some sort of fluid into the system.  The right fluid has not yet been discovered by science, but millions of people thought that it had the other day, and now confidently expect it.  This credulity has a scientific basis, and has no relation to the old absurd belief in Bimini.  We thank goodness that we do not live in a credulous age.

The world would be in a poor case indeed if it had not always before it some ideal or millennial condition, some panacea, some transmutation of base metals into gold, some philosopher’s stone, some fountain of youth, some process of turning charcoal into diamonds, some scheme for eliminating evil.  But it is worth mentioning that in the historical evolution we have always got better things than we sought or imagined, developments on a much grander scale.  History is strewn with the wreck of popular delusions, but always in place of them have come realizations more astonishing than the wildest fancies of the dreamers.  Florida was a disappointment as a Bimini, so were the land of the Ohio, the land of the Mississippi,