The Fountain of Youth: Volume 2 of the Marshlandic Saga

By Douglas V. Maurer

Set in the teeming frontier wilderness of northeast Florida, the Fountain of Youth chronicles the continuing saga of the Ribault family. Investing each generation with its own identity as historical events both factual and metaphysical unfold, one idea survives: to discover the mythic fountain of youth. More than Montezumas treasure or El Dorado, this secluded hideaway had become a holy grail for the Ribaults. Deep in the dense forest of the Marshlandic Kingdom, the quest for Ponce de Leons miracle springs was conducted as generations explored and mapped the region before Napoleon Ribault finally makes a mythic discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524501754

Douglas V. Maurer

Douglas V. Maurer lives in the heart of the Marshlandic Kingdom of Northeast Florida with his wife and ten cats. He is the author of South of Paradise and First Family, the first volume of the Marshlandic Saga.

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Copyright © 2016 by Douglas V. Maurer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016908105

ISBN:   Hardcover             978-1-5245-0173-0

              Softcover               978-1-5245-0174-7

              eBook                    978-1-5245-0175-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/15/2016

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Also by Douglas V. Maurer

South of Paradise

First Family: Vol I of The Marshlandic Saga

101 Saturday Nights

For Carla, Dillon and Cody

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Contents

Note On New World

PART I

The Reformation Cycle: Under the Gun

Chapter 1. A Lost Time and Place

Chapter 2. Yamassee Raid of 1715

Chapter 3. Blackbeard Arrives, 1718

Chapter 4. Clemente Ribault Interlude

Chapter 5. Marshlandic Interlude, 1729

*

(A brief conversation between Don Quixote and Cousin Clemente while scouting in the mythic environs of the Fountain of Youth)

Chapter 6. The War-of-Jenkins’-Ear

Chapter 7. The Siege of 1740

Chapter 8. Letter from a Remote Frontier, 1750

Chapter 9. The Spanish Surrender

Chapter 10. The British Invasion

PART II

The Revolutionary Cycle: Loyalists to the End, 1763-1790

Chapter 11. Muskets and Pipe Smoke

Chapter 12. The Roots of Royalism

*

Marshlandic Poem

Chapter 13. The Appointment

Chapter 14. An Instance of Marshlandic Legality

Chapter 15. The Quartz Crystals

Chapter 16. McQueen’s Reign

*

Excerpt from a letter to McQueen’s daughter, 1792

Chapter 17. The Patriot Rebellion, 1813

*

A Marshlandic Wedding Feast

*

The Treaty of Ghent

Chapter 18. Ambush

Chapter 19. Forging a New Frontier

Chapter 20. A Special Omen

PART III

A Marshlandic Democracy

Chapter 21. Cowford is Conquered

PART IV

On The Edge of Eden

Chapter 22. The Marshlands Becomes Part of the Republic

Chapter 23. Last Christmas on the Kingsley Plantation before the Onset of the Civil War, 1860; From the Diary of Eliza Kingsley

Chapter 24. Sampling the Sacred Waters

Marshlandic Timeline

Glossary of Illustrations, Images, Maps and Marshlandic Landmarks

NOTE ON NEW WORLD

Ponce de Leon, the financially troubled ex-governor of San Juan, received a royal contract in the spring of 1513 to sail northward through the Bahamas and search for a large island rumored to be in that direction. The region was well known to Spanish navigators, and it is likely that de Leon’s initial sighting of the uncharted North American continent was not the first by a European.

He sighted the Florida coast near the Mosquito Inlet at the southeastern border of the native Timucuan nation. It appeared in the morning mist like an apparition, a specter of sand and palm-dotted bluffs. Needing firewood and fresh water, Ponce sent a party ashore. Anxious to see what the new land was like, he pushed his exploratory patrol deep into the coastal interior. Skirmishes quickly took place with native warriors who were entrenched along a creek-bed, and two Spaniards were wounded by fish bone–tipped arrows of exceptional construction. One native was kidnapped and taken back to the ship to be used as a guide on their journey further north.

On his return to port, Juan Ponce de Leon was able to claim his discovery and news of the mysterious island of Florida quickly spread through the Caribbean and back to Europe.

Eight years later, in 1521, Ponce de Leon would return to La Florida with a fully outfitted expedition intending to start a colony near the ancient Timucuan village of Seloy. Having set out from Hispaniola with two hundred men, a small circle of Catholic clergy, seed for planting crops, fifty Andalusian horses, and other livestock, including sheep and cows and goats, his hopes for success were high. Plans of colonization and conquest among the locals unraveled; however, as exploration into the hinterlands devolved into de Leon’s quest, based on an Indian legend of magical, life-giving springs, to discover the quixotic Fountain of Youth. In this incredible new world, anything seemed possible.

Ponce de Leon’s skills as a colonizer were limited at best. He was better known as a womanizer, a charm and talent he displayed continuously on their penetrating journey deep into the Marshlandic heartland while fathering nearly a dozen children with the native women.

Upon landing a second time, the natives—with their usual savage tenacity when deceived—renewed hostilities with Ponce de Leon, as he had double-crossed them on the first invasion. But on this visit, he made new promises, giving those in attendance trinkets, blankets, and looking-glass mirrors. These strange gifts entertained them greatly, and they allowed him the opportunity to pass unscathed along the only road to the west, known even then as a bloodstained and dangerous bandito trail.

De Leon searched and scoured the landscape for eight years before falling victim to an ambusher’s arrow. The oral rendition, which had been passed down through many generations, stated that de Leon and his band—what was left of them—had located the infamous fountain hidden in a lush dell along the eastern ridge of Paynes Prairie, a site brimming with natural coldwater springs, massive sinkholes, and exotic underwater caves. Yet no exact location had ever been pinpointed, fixed, or established.

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Legend says when they located the pool—hidden behind a waterfall— they got a glimpse of the immortals that tended the sacred fountain and were immediately slain with poison arrows after drinking from the pool. The immortals had never been seen since nor the fountain’s healing waters confirmed… until now. As if ordained, the Ribault family were on their renewed hunt for the grail of natural wonders: that very same Fountain of Youth supposedly discovered years before but lost to the annals of time.

PART I

The Reformation Cycle: Under the Gun

The Founding of Carolina in 1670 shattered the tranquility of the English-speaking frontier. Carolinians and Floridians began contesting bitterly for the friendship and allegiance of the Indians; border clashes broke out over unsettled territory; bands of Indians loyal to the English ravaged the Spanish missions and Spanish settlers, locals and the recently transplanted Creeks took reprisals for newly established British settlements.

—Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier 1670–1732

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Chapter 1

A Lost Time and Place

Even Don Quixote Ribault—now twenty-six and just recently made a managing partner in the Ribault Trading Company, succeeding his uncle Cervantes—thought the recent rebuilding of San Agustin had been a long process this time around. The locals, with the assistance of the Spanish crown, had rebuilt the town in coquina, a native shell-rock, and rough-hewn cedar. The tragic events of 1702 and 1704 and various other sudden pirate invasions that struck with devastating force during the previous years had been a bitter disappointment after the turbulent growth and prosperity of the 1690s—good years that held out the promise of even better times to come.

Don Quixote Ribault married Elena de Leon in a private ceremony in 1706, and a year later, Ferdinand was born.

The siege by the English Carolinians and virtual destruction of every Marshlandic village, Catholic mission, and border stronghold—including the burning of San Juan de Puerto, founded in 1587 by woodland marauders and Yamasee warriors—temporarily derailed the locals’ dreams and visions of even greater grandeur. This included the Ribaults, who had forfeited one of two ranches, letting its day laborers go, including farm animals sacrificed to slaughter, while losing numerous friends and close family relations during the years-long devastation.

Yet all was not lost and forsaken. The trading post had survived, although many of their staunchest trading partners were either dead or enslaved. The Spanish still manned Fort San Marcos in defense of the local population to save their own necks. Fortunately, the people’s will to overcome, to rebuild, to endure had not vanished or been mired in regret and self-pity. A new breed of maverick trader stood in the wings. Misfortune, as it turned out, could be rectified, even reversed. The warehouse had burned but was rebuilt in stone this time, to withstand the attacks of both men and weather: the continual pounding of sun, wind, rain, cannons, muskets, and fire-tipped arrows.

The land, now considered family property, was an elemental kingdom, like gold, and would only continue as long as there was someone there to man the mainsails, to recognize the connection between land and longevity. Without ownership, the land fell into a cycle of random habitation and a distinct return to the extreme state of savages in nature. Hadn’t Thomas Hobbes helped launch the sacred notion of property and ownership to preserve the integrity and social structure of culture in his book Leviathan? At least it appeared evident to those who had watched the Creek Confederacy reinhabit the ruins of the Timucuan mission villages.

The natives, on the other hand (who were a conglomeration of mixed-breeds), had no notion of ownership and had not grasped or endorsed the idea of personal property, not having understood the concept in the first place. All lands belonged to the Great Spirit and the people, and this strange idea that large tracts of property (a relatively novel commodity in the New World) could be seized or maintained by force sailed right over them. To the locals of the Indian Nation, a confederacy of over fifty villages and numerous tribes across East Florida struggling to survive under extraneous circumstances, owning land was a truly novel concept. They couldn’t believe how or why anyone would have even conceived of such a ridiculous notion.

In 1710, Don Quixote, the emerging young leader of the ever-enduring Ribault clan, was hoping the worst times were behind them. The citizens of San Agustin and straggling marshlanders up and down the coast had proclaimed a renaissance in the city as the products of agriculture and the profits of trading had increased profoundly. Portentous events in the heavens signaled a new era, a reconfigured alignment. A bloodred moon punctuated the skies. Tides rose and the sea churned. Even his young daughter, Franchesca, had marveled with her brother, Ferdinand, and their assorted friends at the sighting of the San Agustin sea creature, which brought mobs of people out to the beach in the anticipation of even glimpsing such a fabled creature.

Just think, their father said to them, we have our own mythological beast!

Rumors of the giant octopus had been in circulation for generations, and now surfacing as a symbol of its own magnificence and of its changing circumstances, the monster had been sighted stirring in volatile waters again.

Don Quixote, whose thick beard and intense glare reminded people of Moses, gave immense thanks during the lean and troubled times for the private tunnels his family had been digging and maintaining for over a hundred years. They were stocked full of surplus novelties and supplies: grains, clothing, Indian jewelry, weapons, barrels of wine and rum, valuable skins, caches of dried herbs, tools, dry gunpowder, and other sundry equipment. These were all items that could be sold or bartered to keep them alive. He shuddered to think of how the family might have survived otherwise.

Like many of the others—his extended family, associates and friends—he might have lost everything. Instead, the Ribaults, true survivors, had maintained their favored status in San Agustin, and were able to help foster others with jobs, government contacts, and most importantly, small lines of credit. The Spanish crown’s aid had also been appreciated during this difficult time and had touched nearly every citizen. The governor even offered the assistance of his soldiers and master builders, while instructing other personnel to assist in the allocation of materials and labor. The crown, in San Agustin’s true time of need, had earned the respect and loyalty of its inhabitants by financing the town’s reconstruction and restoring part of Fort San Marcos while employing hundreds of men with families.

On the social calendar, Don Quixote’s older brother, Rembrandt, a hunter and fisherman by inclination and only forty-one, was hosting a wedding for his eldest son, Martin, who had been engaged to a Spanish woman from a trading family in Seville. Following a three-day ceremony complete with feasting, music, the follies of acrobats and fire-eaters, and the cutting of a huge chocolate cake, the young couple moved into a home that had been restored in coquina by family members. The stone for the two-storey house—with an iron balcony over the street and one in the rear overlooking recently planted gardens and orange groves—had been freshly quarried by runaway slaves working as free men, alongside indentured convicts, who had narrowly escaped their masters in the colony of Carolina.

Down the street, fresh stone had gone to replace the blackened walls of the governor’s house. When the raids came again—and Don Quixote feared they would—the remodeled city wouldn’t be so quick to burn down.

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Governor’s house

Don Juan Ribault, his long white hair glowing with streaks of gold, was the patriarch of the family and the company. He was the eldest of the three brothers, of which only one now remained: Pedro, a reclusive horse breeder who hardly ever left the hacienda in the western hinterlands, who was also white-haired, blue-eyed, stooped (a common marshlandic condition), and permanently tanned from so many long hours in the intense coastal sun. His youngest brother, Cervantes, Don Quixote’s father, had just died after surviving a surprise attack and making a valiant standoff against a wild band of Carolinians, only to catch a stray hunter’s arrow on the return home.

Don Juan casually observed his nephews, Clemente and Manuel, who were Pedro’s two sons, and the heir apparent, Don Quixote, the youngest of the three. They were all sturdy young men now and fortunate to be born under the Ribault family banner. Future heirs to an expanding and profitable trading company, they held their own potential success in their hands.

Under Rembrandt’s supervision—a job he had maintained for over five years now, through thick and thin, surviving in the heat and during the nights when it was borderline freezing—the other two stocked crates and large boxes. Rembrandt Ribault, who had been at odds with his father the first few years, had now emerged as the leading candidate for company director since the death of his father, Cervantes. He had finally earned the respect and admiration of his elders, all the Ribault family stockholders (of which there were a few dozen recipients), his peers in the warehouse, and finally, his immediate family—his wife and son, Martin, and even cousin Clemente, a warrior and shaman who had never been married and mostly lived in the wilderness.

With the sun cutting off his view momentarily, Don Juan emerged slowly and deliberately from the shadows of the long warehouse. He stood tall, his long white hair blowing like a flag in the wind as he stood admiring the three docks under construction. It was progress for the first time in years, now that he stopped to think about it. And he liked it.

These new docks will greatly enhance our potential for profit. The wily old trader beamed at Rembrandt, who shook his head approvingly at Don Quixote.

Clemente, the seer and high-priest of nature in the family had herbal concoctions on his mind and shrugged his shoulders as if he could not have cared less.

One day it will matter. Don Juan grinned. When you have a family of your own to support.

Not to me, old one. I want to sail with the pirates and soar with the eagles! he said, chiding the old man with a smile.

Oh, you do? His elder scowled. Well then, you’re doomed to a life that will be unusually short and brutal. You want to live a long time and get gray hair? You must stay in San Agustin and tend to the trading business. Here the family can nourish and protect you. There is so much work to do on our farms and river property, and we want to hire people within the family if we can.

Manuel laughed. I’m staying, Uncle, to raise and sell horses!

Excellent, Manuel. Now that’s a good decision.

I’m running back to the forest soon. Anywhere I can to get away from these crowds. Clemente snorted like a young bull.

"Where would you go? His uncle said, Of all people… Now barely able to contain his laughter, he caught himself sneering in the mirror’s reflection. Where does a young man go to seek his fortune these days?"

Up to Georgia to join the British raiders, Manuel jeered.

Your mother’s heart will be broken.

There was a long silence. His mother was dead. Is that in heaven or hell?

Finally, Don Juan said I’ll see you boys later and was off to inspect the heavy palisade or city gates erected a few years back to block any entrance into San Agustin via the New King’s Road. The locks were broken and had to be repaired. Prior to that fortification, there had been no city wall or security in the city except inside Fort San Marcos.

Once that project was complete, Don Juan visited a friend who was recuperating from being hit and nearly killed by a falling tree in the new one-room hospital with a small wing for the dying. A parish church and a block of administrative buildings adjoining that property had also just recently been renovated with coquina rock and were finally ready for the people to take advantage of their services.

Things in general and in San Agustin were continuing to look up for the Ribault family, the trading company, and the new residents of the town. If only the buccaneer and English invaders posing as peace-loving traders (when they were two-faced scoundrels) would leave them alone long enough to rebuild and prosper. Time enough to fortify the fort and city plaza with deeper and wider moats and redesign the interior grid to accommodate growth and heavier traffic. It was time they needed and the safety found in numbers, the comfort of their peers being necessary to continue. According to the court astrologer’s and star-charting sky gazers, even the coming alignments and respective conjunctions were cooperating.

The new city was laid out in accordance with the plans prescribed for colonial settlement by King Phillip II. In a cold climate the streets shall be wide; in a hot climate the streets shall be narrow. In San Agustin’s case, narrow streets provided ready shade and acted like a chimney in giving drafts of air. Officials of the Treasury in San Agustin—after publicly stating that in the preceding years of Carolinian attacks, twenty-nine Catholic missions had been extinguished along East Florida’s