Note 139-1 — JOURNAL OF THE FIRST VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS

Las Casas, I. 329, identifies the mames as ajes and batatas. The batatas, whence our word “potato,” is the sweet potato. Mames is more commonly written ñames or ignames. This is the Guinea Negro name of the Dioscorea sativa, in English “Yam.” Ajes is the native West Indies name. See Peschel, Zeitalter der Entdeckungen, p. 139, and Columbus’s journal, Dec. 13 and Dec. 16. Faxones are the common haricot kidney beans or string beans, Phaseolus vulgaris. This form of the name seems a confusion of the Spanish fásoles and the Portuguese feijões. That Columbus, an Italian by birth who had lived and married in Portugal and removed to Spain in middle life, should occasionally make slips in word-forms is not strange. More varieties of this bean are indigenous in America than were known in Europe at the time of the discoveries. Cf. De Candolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants, pp. 338 ff.