[3] In the second volume of his book A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1725), Irish physician and naturalist Hans Sloane includes a description of a species of palm he names Prickly-Pole,[4] which Salzman and Judd identified as Bactris jamaicensis.

[5] In his 1864 Flora of the British West Indies, August Grisebach lumped all Greater Antillean Bactris species into B. plumeriana.

Liberty Hyde Bailey's collections from Jamaica allowed him to separate Jamaican plants into a new species which he named B. jamaicana in 1938.

It grows in lower montane rain forests and savannas in the John Crow Mountains, Cockpit Country, and Central Plateau,[3] between 330 and 860 metres (1,080 and 2,820 ft) above sea level.

[7] Bailey reported in 1938 that the fruit was fed to hogs and eaten by children, but Salzman and Judd's local informant was unaware of any utilization of the plant other than as a food source for birds.