Papaya: a named man, a named route, and the first recorded colonial transfer of an American fruit

Oviedo's chapter on the papaya gives the fruit three names and then does something rarer: it names the man who moved it. A hidalgo called Alonso de Valverde carried the fruit from the country of the cacique Quebore, whom he held in encomienda, to Darién, where the Spaniards sowed the seed and passed it to Hispaniola and the other islands. The plant was already a Mesoamerican domesticate; what the Spanish added was transport, and the document records the coercion in the same sentence.