This date year was carved into a rough-hewn cross placed in the Basilica Cathedral of Santa María la Menor in Santo Domingo (now the capital of the Dominican Republic), at the beginning of the building's construction.

Completed about 1540, it is the oldest church in the West Indies, and its interior was ornamented with carved mahogany woodwork that is still in almost perfect condition after 500 years in the tropics.

[7] Other records refer to the use of mahogany between 1521 and 1540, when Spanish explorers employed the wood for making canoes and for ship repair work in the West Indies.

It seems likely that the merits of mahogany were already well-known and that it was used extensively, since King Philip II of Spain's advisors requisitioned it for making the interior trim work and elaborate furniture of a group of some of the most expensive buildings ever built in Europe:[8] "When in 1578 the king ordered incorruptible [i.e. rot-resistant] and very good woods – cedar, ebony, mahogany, acana, guayacan and iron wood – sent to embellish the Excorial, they had to be brought from a distance by the slaves...

"[9] Mahogany's first major use in Spain and England was for ship building, and during the 18th century it was the chief wood employed in Europe for that purpose.

"[11] In his "The History of Barbados, etc", the Welsh scholar John Davies (1625–1693) refers to merchant ships prior to 1666 calling on West Indies ports to take on occasional shipments of mahogany timber: "Some masters of ships who trade to the Caribbies many times bring thence planks of this wood which are of such length and breadth that there needs but one to make a fair and large table.

[8] Spain turned to Cuba for supplies of timber suitable for ship masts, since the rebellion in Flanders (the Eighty Years' War began in 1566) had shut off that source.

One of these, the Gibraltar, of 80 guns, captured by Lord Rodney off Cape St. Vincent was broken up in the royal dock yard at Pembroke, and though she must have been one of the oldest ships afloat, yet all her timbers were so sound as when they were put into her, and the whole British navy, and if I (Capt.

Chaffell, secretary of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company) am not mistaken, are now supplied with tables made out of the Gibraltar timbers.

The most notable of those instances involved the PT-109, commanded by the young John F. Kennedy: The forward half of this boat stayed afloat for 12 hours after she was rammed by a Japanese destroyer.

Fifty-six years before naturalist and illustrator John James Audubon was born, Volume Two of Mark Catesby's folio sized natural history was published in 1729.

[11] Catesby's hand-colored plate of the mahogany tree, along with a description in English and French (not Latin as might have been expected), was the basis for Linnaeus using his new binomial nomenclature to name it.

Two years later, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin reclassified it and placed the West Indies Mahogany Tree into his newly created genus, Swietenia.

Supplies of S. mahagoni are very rare due to historic over-harvesting, and most mahogany marketed now comes from other related species, often with faster growth but of lower wood quality.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) lists S. mahagoni in Appendix II (only saw-logs, sawn wood and veneers).

National assessments marked S. mahagoni as Least Concern in Cuba, Critically Endangered in the Cayman Islands, and Vulnerable in the Dominican Republic.