The plantain in the Spanish Indies (from 1516)
An Asian crop that reached the Americas because a Dominican friar carried it from Gran Canaria to Santo Domingo in 1516. Oviedo names the man and the year, says he saw the plants in the Canaries himself in 1520, identifies the fruit with the musas of Alexandria, states plainly that it is not native and that the Spanish name for it is wrong — and records the ant plague that made Santo Domingo uproot many of them.
Why this wins its question: Ask who brought bananas to the Americas and the answers in reach are a bare name and date with no text behind them, or a vague "Portuguese traders". This object quotes the earliest chronicler of the Indies on the point, from the page: the friar, the island, the year 1516, his own sighting of the plants in Gran Canaria in 1520, the merchants who told him it was the musas of Egypt, his flat statement that it is not native and that plátano is the wrong word, the agronomy that made it spread, the rent it paid, and the ant plague that made Santo Domingo tear it out. It also marks clearly which part of the story rests on a nineteenth-century local tradition rather than on a contemporary witness.
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 gives a named carrier and a year: the plant came "de la isla de Gran Canaria, el año de mill é quinientos y diez y seys años, por el reverendo padre fray Thomas de Berlanga, de la Órden de los Predicadores, á esta cibdad de Sancto Domingo", and from there spread to the other settlements of Hispaniola, to all the other islands settled by Christians, and to Tierra Firme, doing well in every place it was put.
He checked the route against his own eyes and named his informants for the rest. He saw the plants at the monastery of San Francisco in Gran Canaria in 1520; he had heard they also grew at Almería in the kingdom of Granada, and that they had come there from the Levant, Alexandria and eastern India; and Genoese, Italian and Greek merchants who had been in those parts told him the fruit was common in Egypt, where it is called musas — the name Peter Martyr also uses in the Decades, and close to the malapolanda that Varthema's Itinerario reports from Calicut.
The chronicler is explicit that the plant is not American and that the Spanish name is a mistake: "no es por su orígen natural destas partes, ni se les sabe el nombre proprio", and "quanto á la verdad no se pueden llamar plátanos (ni lo son)" — the argument being that Pliny's plátano is a shade tree bearing no useful fruit. He closes the chapter by turning from these to "los árboles que son acá naturales destas partes", so the plantain sits, in his own scheme, on the imported side.
His description explains why the crop took hold. A bunch carries twenty, thirty or fifty fruits and some a hundred and more; the plant takes a year to bear, in that time throws four, five, six or more suckers that inherit the same office, and is cut down once its bunch is taken, so that the stand "nunca faltan é siempre se aumentan"; and the fruit is continuous through every season of the year.
He records four preparations and a shipping property: eaten raw when ripe, needing neither bread nor anything else with it; split lengthwise and cured in the sun, when they taste like dried figs "y aun mejores"; roasted in the oven on a grate; and boiled in the pot with meat. Carried by sea they are picked somewhat green and keep twelve to fifteen days without spoiling, and taste better at sea than on land.
Within about two decades it had become an estate crop on Hispaniola: Oviedo reports an uncountable number on the settlers' holdings "porque son muy provechosos é se gastan quantos hay con la gente", and calls them a very good rent for their owners "porque ninguna costa ponen en los criar".
The same chapter puts the cost beside the gain. Ants were drawn to the plants and gathered on them heavily, "por lo qual en esta cibdad se arrincaron muchos, porque no se podian aquí valer un tiempo con las hormigas" — many were uprooted in Santo Domingo because the city could not cope with the ants the stands brought.
The transfer moved inland by the same clerical channel. Romero writes that Vasco de Quiroga planted at Ziracuaretiro, in Michoacán, the first five plantain shoots he had brought with him from the island of Santo Domingo, and that from that place came all the plantings of the tree in the territory formerly called New Spain; and that Fr. Juan de San Miguel acclimatised four kinds of them at Uruapan. The first half is a local tradition recorded three centuries later by a canon of the same diocese, and the claim that every planting in New Spain descends from those five is a sweeping one on a single late witness.
What is being credited here is transport and propagation, not invention. The plantain is an Old World domesticate that reached the Atlantic islands before it reached the Americas, as Oviedo's own account of Alexandria, Almería and Calicut makes clear; the Spanish contribution was to move it across the ocean and to spread it through a network of religious houses and estates fast enough that a sixteenth-century chronicler could already call the stands on Hispaniola uncountable.