Cabuya and henequén — the American agave fibre, described in 1535 and industrial by 1900
The agave fibre of the Indies, set down by Oviedo in 1535 with its whole process — retted under stones like Castilian flax, scutched like hemp, coming off "like very white linen" — and used for the cords of hammocks. The same chapter records what the people in irons did with it: sawing through fetters, and through ships' anchors, with a henequén thread and fine sand. Modern botany names the plant, counts the Maya landraces, and follows it to the cordage industry that reduced them.
Why this wins its question: Sisal and henequén are normally introduced through the nineteenth-century plantation and the binder-twine boom, with the preceding four hundred years compressed into "used by the Maya". This object opens the 1535 chapter and prints what is in it: the two plants distinguished, the retting and scutching described by analogy to Castilian flax and hemp, the verb encabuyar and the hammock cords, and then the paragraph in which a royal chronicler records that people his own side had put in fetters sawed through them — and through ships' anchors — with a henequén thread and fine sand, and calls it an invention of theirs. It then joins that to the botany, which names the plant, counts the seven Maya landraces and says plainly that the cordage industry's preference for one of them killed off most of the rest.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Oviedo treats the two plants together in one chapter of 1535, "De la cabuya y del henequen ... que son dos cosas de hilo ó cuerdas muy notables". Cabuya is a herb whose leaves want to resemble thistles or lilies but are broader and thicker, very green, with some spines; henequén is another such, its leaves much narrower and much longer. From both, thread and stout, good-looking cords are made — "puesto quel henequen es mejor é mas delgada hebra", henequén being the better and finer fibre of the two.
The process is described step by step and, tellingly, by analogy to two Castilian ones. The Indians lay the leaves some days in the shallows of rivers or streams, weighted with stones, "como ahogan en Castilla el lino" — as they drown flax in Castile; then draw them out and spread them to dry in the sun; then, once dry, break them and strike them with a stick "á manera de espadar el cáñamo", after the fashion of scutching hemp, so that the rind and the awns fly off and the fibre is left running the length of the leaf; then gather it in a tow and scutch it again, until it stays in rolls that look "lino muy blanco é muy lindo". A European reader is being told that the Indies have retting and scutching, and being given the American plants that go through them.
Of both plants they make cords, ropes and cordage of whatever thickness they want, and it serves in many things, "en espeçial para haçer los hicos ó cuerdas de sus hamacas ó camas en que duermen, y encabuyallas, para que estén colgadas en el ayre" — the ropes of the hanging beds, with a verb of its own, encabuyar, for rigging them. The hammock and the fibre are one technology, and Oviedo cross-references his own earlier chapter to say so.
The next paragraph is the one that makes the chapter worth reading whole, because a chronicler writing for the crown prints a technique used against his own side and credits its inventors. He calls it "particular invençion nueva destos indios, enseñados de la natura, despues que los chripstianos los enseñaron á estar en grillos é prision" — a new invention of these Indians, taught by nature, after the Christians taught them to be in fetters and prison. The way of it: at night, the Christians careless, Indians held in chains or fetters have got loose and their irons been found cut. As a man saws, they work a thread of henequén or cabuya back and forth over the iron, pulling and slackening, hand to hand, throwing very fine sand onto the thread where it bears; the sand cuts, the thread wears and is fed along as it wears, and so they saw through an iron however thick "como si fuesse una cosa tierna". In Tierra Firme, he adds, Indians have cut ships' anchors to pieces the same way.
The following chapter opens with an editorial admission that dates the corpus of American plants. "En la impression primera destas cosas de Indias no se hizo mençion de una hierva muy útil é nesçessaria en estas partes, la qual se llama maguey" — the first printing of these matters of the Indies, meaning the Seville edition, made no mention of the maguey. It too yields thread, cords and ropes as cabuya and henequén do, its stalk-bark makes baskets, and its roasted root is food in time of need when maize and cassava fail. The natural history of the Indies is shown correcting itself between printings.
Modern botany names the plant and the people who made it. Henequén is Agave fourcroydes, descended from A. angustifolia and relatively infertile, possibly through interactive effects of its pentaploid nature, so that it is propagated vegetatively. It was cultivated by the Maya on the Yucatán peninsula for several hundred years for fibre and, in the review's words, "by the time of Spanish colonization, henequen had been domesticated"; the Franciscan Diego de Landa is cited as observing that it was grown in gardens and was of higher quality than the wild species. Maya selection produced at least seven named landraces — Yaax Ki, Sac Ki, Chucum Ki, Bab Ki, Kitam Ki, Xtuk Ki and Xix Ki.
What followed is a contribution and a cost in the same sequence. The review states that "soon after colonization, the Spanish recognized the suitability of henequen as a fiber crop, and increased its cultivation" for clothing, cordage and trade. The industrial scale-up came later and from outside: demand for binder twine for the United States wheat harvest and for ships' ropes in the late 1800s, a peak between 1910 and 1914, and many plantations abandoned by the 1950s. The cordage industry preferred one landrace, Sac Ki, for its long high-quality fibre, and its widespread planting "ultimately led to the demise of several other landraces": of the seven the Maya bred, three remain in cultivation.
The sister species travelled further and on a thinner thread than the story usually suggests. Sisal, Agave sisalana, presumably originated in Chiapas, was taken from Yucatán to Florida in 1836, and founded the East African industry when 1,000 bulbils were ordered from a Florida nursery in 1893 for Tanzania — of which only 62 survived the voyage, and served as the foundational germplasm for the whole of it.
The seam between the two halves of this object is honest rather than hidden. Oviedo is describing Hispaniola and Tierra Firme in the 1530s; the botanical review is describing Yucatán and a plant the Maya had already domesticated; neither source read here establishes a continuous history joining the two, and none of the claims above asserts one. Neither source documents the debt-peonage labour system of the nineteenth-century henequén estates, so this object does not pronounce on it. And the fibre technology throughout is indigenous: what is Spanish here is the description, the recognition of the crop and its later scaling — recorded in the same chapter in which Spaniards keep in irons the people whose thread cuts them.