The history of papaya appears to be first documented by
Oviedo, the Director of Mines in Hispaniola (Antilles) from
1513 to 1525, where he describes how Alphonso de Valverde
took papaya seeds from the coasts of Panama to
Darien, then to San Domingo and the other islands of the
West Indies. The Spaniards gave it the name ‘papaya’ and
took the plant to The Philippines, from where it expanded to
Malaya and finally India in 1598 (Schery 1952). By the
time papaya trees were established in Uganda in 1874, their
distribution had already spread through most tropical and
sub-tropical countries.