>King and queen of Spain, give me lots of money to search for the Fountain of YouthHow do people like this get taken even slightly seriously?
>>17410002The King and Queen had examples of people just exploring randomly and stumbling across boatfuls of gold so they were inclined to just fund random bullshit on the off chance something gets found. It is entirely possible that there was secret information only discussed person to person that they knew about but never got recorded in history and searching for the fountain of youth was just the cover story. That secret information could just be random stuff like "X tribe said there might be good pickings if we go north" or "some basque fishemen implied there was good trading opportunities in this place". The way John Cabot just mysteriously manages to "discover" Newfoundland for England by heading straight for it is another such example where there is good evidence that there might have been prior knowledge of its existence and so it was just a matter of making the information public, and the subsequent voyage where he mysteriously died might just have been about removing the evidence of having had prior knowledge of the place which he might be able to use for blackmail purposes.
>>17410002they just paid him money to fuck off and stop bothering them
>>17410002>builds a fucking rowboat with his own money >fills it with some of the senpai>they go harassing French corsairs>next thing you know the King has put him in charge of the Treasure Fleetkek
>>17410002Plot twist, he found the fontain and anglos 400 years later used its waters to clean the toilets of the local McDonald's and the sewers of the regional burgerburg generical burg
>>17410002In the age before you could easily verify if something is bullshit, it’s not that crazy
>>17410002Don't listen to the pseuds redditors """historians""" here. People were in fact more retarded in the past. You ARE smarter than the vast majority of retards who were born during a time when people thought disease was caused by demons in your food.>>17410210Mexichango meltdown
>>17410002imagine if he'd been right though. Literally infinite ROI
