American cotton: a Yucatán domesticate that clothes the world, and the Spanish record of the fibre it left behind

The cotton grown almost everywhere today is Gossypium hirsutum, domesticated in the northern Yucatán some 5,500 years ago. Two Spanish witnesses show what the sixteenth century made of it: Oviedo reporting that Hispaniola's cotton went uncultivated because sugar and hides paid better, and Acosta counting 5,677 arrobas of cochineal against 64 arrobas of cotton in one fleet — the American fibre clothed America, not Europe, and did duty as money where coin was absent.