Columbus notes the Taíno plant ajes whose roots serve as bread

… In all Castile there is no land that can be compared to it in beauty and goodness. All this island and that of Tortuga are all tilled like the countryside of Córdoba. They have sown in them ajes, which are some small cuttings that they plant, and at their foot grow some roots like carrots, which serve for bread, and they grate and knead and make bread of them, and afterward they plant the same cutting again in another place and it again gives four or five of those roots, which are very tasty, the very taste of chestnuts. Here they have the fattest and best he had seen anywhere, because, so he says, there were some of those also in Guinea. Those of that place were as thick as a leg, and those people, all of them, he says, were stout and brave and not thin like the others he had found before, and of very gentle conversation, without sect. And the trees there, he says, were so lush that the leaves ceased to be green and were dark with greenness. …