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.
Why this wins its question: "The Aztecs used cacao beans as money" is a sentence every encyclopaedia carries and almost none of them sources. This object goes to the two sixteenth-century books that actually state it and quotes the sheets: a chapter heading that announces the currency, a rabbit at ten beans, a slave at a hundred, a night at eight or ten, five hundred handed out after a beating, tribute levied in the same beans, and — found nowhere in the popular accounts — the forgery of hollowed shells stuffed with earth together with the merchant's counter-technique of rolling each bean between finger and thumb. It then sets Acosta's 1590 denominations of five, thirty and a hundred beside Oviedo's Nicaraguan prices to show the currency still working two generations later, prints the cost of it in the same breath as the ingenuity, and states plainly which famous claims about cacao money these pages do not license.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The money is in the chapter heading, not in a modern reading of it. Book VIII, chapter XXX of Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias is announced as "Del árbol llamado cacao, é algunos le llaman cacaguate, é su fructa é bevraje é açeite. E cómo su fructa en algunas partes sirve por moneda é se hallan por ella todas las cosas que entre los indios se tractan". The tree, he writes, is not of the islands but of the Tierra-Firme, growing in New Spain and in the province of Nicaragua, "y este es el árbol de todos el mas presçiado entre los indios".
He then states the equivalence explicitly: the beans are kept and guarded "en el mismo presçio é estimaçion que los chripstianos é otras gentes tienen el oro é la moneda; porque assi lo son estas almendras para ellos, pues que por ellas compran todas las otras cosas". The prices he gives for Nicaragua are specific — a rabbit is worth ten of these almonds, and for four almonds they give eight pomas or nísperos of the fruit they call munonçapot.
The same sentence prices a human being. Oviedo continues, without changing tone, that "un esclavo vale çiento, é mas é menos almendras destas, segund es la pieça ó la voluntad de los contrayentes se conçiertan". A slave at a hundred beans, ten rabbits' worth, is the cost side of this currency and it is recorded by the man describing it; the enslavement is indigenous and pre-existing on his account, and neither this object nor his page settles how far the Spanish market then enlarged it.
He records a second price of the same kind. Where there are women who sell their bodies, "como entre los chripstianos las públicas meretriçes", whoever wants them "les dá por una carrera ocho ó diez almendras, como él é ella se conçiertan"; the local word he gives for such a woman is guatepol. The comparison is his own and so is the judgement in it.
What may be the earliest European description of counterfeit currency in the Americas, with its detection method. Oviedo writes that among those almonds "hay sus fraudes para engañar unos á otros": the shell is taken off, the bean stuffed with earth or something else, and the husk closed again "tan sotilmente que no se conosçe". The remedy is tactile — the receiver counts them one by one, passing each between the index finger and the thumb, "é por bien que esté embutida la falsificada, se entiende en el tacto, é no está tan igual como la buena".
The monetary logic reaches the drink itself. The common people, Oviedo says, neither dare nor can indulge in the cacao beverage, "porque no es mas que empobreçer adrede é tragarse la moneda ó echalla en donde se pierda" — to drink it is to swallow the coin. Only the lords called calachunis and the principal men use it, "porque lo pueden haçer, é les dan tributos destas tales monedas ó almendras, demas de las tener de su cosecha é heredamientos": tribute is levied in the currency, and the currency is also the luxury.
Two witnesses, fifty years and a continent apart, describe the same shade-growing technique. Oviedo reports the trees planted in fertile watered ground in rows ten or twelve feet apart, with other trees set among them — "los indios yaguaguyt, é los chripstianos de la madera negra" — because in some years the sun scalds the fruit so that it comes out empty or is lost; the shade trees grow to about double the height of the cacao and are pruned upward as they go. Acosta writes in 1590 that the tree is delicate and that "para guardarle del Sol no le queme, ponen junto a el otro arbol grande, que solo sirue de hazelle sombra, y a este llaman la madre del cacao".
Acosta finds the currency still working in 1590 and adds a use Oviedo does not record: "Sirue tambien de moneda, porque con cinco cacaos se compra vna cosa, y con treynta otra, y con ciento otra, sin que aya contradicion: y vsan dar de limosna estos cacaos a pobres que piden." A denominated currency of five, thirty and a hundred, accepted without dispute, and small change given to beggars.
The same page turns the bean into cargo. Acosta reports cacao prized by Indians and Spaniards alike and "vno delos ricos, y gruessos tratos de la nueua España", kept without spoiling because it is a dry fruit, with ships loaded with it coming from the province of Guatemala; and that in the previous year "vn cossario Ingles quemò en el puerto de Guatulco de nueua España mas de cien mil cargas de Cacao". The figure is one printed by a Jesuit writing from memory of American service and is not corroborated by any other source read here; the corsair is not named on the page and is not named here.
Acosta also prints an unflattering first impression of the drink the money was made of. The chief benefit of cacao, he writes, is "vn breuaje que hazen que llaman Chocolate, que es cosa loca lo que en aquella tierra le precian", and those not brought up to it find it disgusting, "porque tiene vna espuma arriba, y vn borbollon como de hezes, que cierto es menester mucho credito para passar con ello"; yet it is the prized drink with which the Indians welcome visiting lords, and the Spanish women born to the country "se mueren por el negro chocolate". It is taken hot, cool and tepid, with spices and much chili, made into a paste, and said to be pectoral, good for the stomach and against catarrh.
A fourth kind of payment, recorded with the violence attached to it. In the Nicaragua book of the third part, Oviedo describes a rite he watched in which four young men were struck repeatedly with wax-headed rods until the rods broke — "era bestial burla, por estar como estaban desnudos" — after which "el caçique mandó sacar cacao, é dió de su mano á cada uno de los quatro hasta quinientos granos ó almendras del dicho cacao". Five hundred beans, five slaves' worth on the price he gives elsewhere, handed out as a ceremonial payment; the young men, he was told, went from square to square asking cacao of the lords and taking the blows to get it.
What this object does not claim. Neither page read gives a systematic tariff, and the equivalences above are what one royal official was told or saw in one province at one time; Oviedo was an officer of the settlement he describes and a declared opponent of Las Casas, and Acosta a Jesuit provincial writing after the fact. Nothing is claimed here about Mexica imperial tribute in cacao, about the volumes traded before contact, or about how far the colonial market changed the currency's use, because the pages opened for this object do not support any of it.