Cacao as money — the currency two Spanish chroniclers counted, priced and watched being forged

Oviedo's chapter on the cacao tree carries money in its own heading, and the pages under it give a working price list for Nicaragua, the tribute paid in beans, and the trick used to forge them along with the way to detect it by touch. Acosta, half a century later, finds the same currency still buying at five, thirty and a hundred beans and given as alms. Both are read here from the sheets, with what the same pages say a hundred beans could buy.