Fonseca Island

On the world map printed in 1544 by Sebastian Cabot (Italian: Sebastiano Caboto), who was in the service of the English and Spanish crowns, an island is marked northeast of the mouth of the Orinoco that bears the name “San Bernardo”.

[3] With a slightly different position, this island appears in 1599 on the world map by Jodocus Hondius under the name “y de fonte seca”.

The English geographer Richard Hakluyt located Fonseca in his main work of 1589: Principal navigations, voyages, and discoveries..., at the position 11° 15´ north.

[5] This caused King Charles I to give the island to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke & Montgomery, as a fiefdom, although little was known about Fonseca.

[2] It was also during the reign of Charles I, in the 1630s, that John Pym, along with other prominent Puritans, founded the Providence Island Company to help settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony disaffected by the climate to settle in the more pleasant region of the Caribbean.

[8]) He claimed that a sailor told him that during a storm he had escaped to the island of Fonseca, which was populated by good-looking women, with male children being sent away at an early age.