La canela de Quito — the Amazonian spice the Spanish record described by its cupules

In the 1530s Spanish witnesses in Peru reported a cinnamon that was not cinnamon: an aromatic traded down to Quito that came not as bark but as the cup of a fruit, "unos vassillos como de bellotas". Oviedo printed that testimony three times. Modern chemistry of Ocotea quixos, the Amazonian ishpingo whose dried cupules are still its commercial product, matches the description — and the same pages carry the killing at Cajamarca and the nine hundred Andean dead on one crossing to Quito.