The coconut on two American coasts: what the Manila galleon carried, and what was already there

America has three coconut populations with three histories: the Pacific coast of Mexico, Philippine and stocked by repeated Spanish shipments after the conquest; the Caribbean and Atlantic, Indian and Portuguese; and the palms of Pacific Panama, descended from perhaps two to five Philippine founders on a date still disputed. The documents in that dispute are Spanish chronicles, and the charge that Oviedo could not tell a coconut from another palm traces to an 1851 engraver.