When Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, he and his crew became the first Europeans to discover tobacco and the practice of smoking. Their first contact with the plant came when Columbus, suited in his best clothes, met a boatload of natives whom he assumed were Chinese. They offered him and his entourage gifts of fruit, beads, and dried tobacco. The Europeans accepted the beads and ate the fruit but threw the pungent leaves into the sea. The Europeans first saw people smoking when an expedition party met up with a group of natives that, as transcribed by Columbus chronicler Saint Bartolomé, “had a little lighted band made from a kind of a plant whose aroma it was their custom to inhale”.
Two of Columbus’s crew, Rodrigo de Jerez, and Luis de Torres, began smoking themselves, got hooked and became regular users. Rodrigo carried a supply of tobacco back with him on the return voyage and continued the habit, totally shocking those around him who witnessed him puffing. Poor addicted Rodrigo was convicted by the Inquisitors for being possessed by the devil and was thrown into jail for 3 years.
While the general European reaction to tobacco smoking was disgust, numerous reports began to arrive from the Americas on tobacco as a panacea. The explorer, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, told of how tobacco was used in Brazil to treat a multitude of ailments including abscesses, fistulas, sores and polyps. The Spanish priest, Bernadino de Sahagun, described how smelling fresh green leaves relieved headaches, rubbing powdered leaves inside the mouth cured colds, and crushed leaves healed neck lesions. Other observers across the America’s noted that tobacco was being used by the Amerindians to treat diarrhea, aches and pains, catarrh, burns and wounds.
By the late 1500s well placed people across all of Europe were extolling tobaccos health benefits. The French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot, told of how he had treated a tumor on a Lisbon man with an ointment prepared from tobacco and then cured one of his pages for an ulcerated leg, a woman whose face was infected with ringworm and a cook who almost cut his thumb off. He sent seeds and plants to the Queen of France, Catherine de’ Medici, proclaiming its curative properties. She and the French court were the first to use tobacco regularly as snuff, calling it the ‘Nicotian Herb’.
Within about a decade, the Italians, Germans and Swiss joined the tobacco craze, along with the English and Dutch. Tobacco soon reached the Middle East via the Genoese and Venetian merchants, and Africa, China, and Asia through the Spanish and Portuguese traders. The Iberians also introduced tobacco to Africa, where it was quickly accepted by the Muslims. By 1600, tobacco was a part of the culture of even the most remote tribes in Africa.
It was the English and Dutch who started smoking it for simple pleasure. The great sea captains, Sir John Hawkins, and Sir Francis Drake had seen native Americans smoking tobacco in pipes and brought the practice back to England. The most trusted advisor of Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh, convinced her and the Royal Court to take up the habit and popularized smoking by handing out pipes and pouches of it at the popular hang-out, the Mermaid Tavern. Gallants of the court smoked it with theatrical flourish in elaborate pipes and smoking paraphernalia. The cost of tobacco kept the masses from smoking it for a few decades, but as the 17th century dawned, tobacco was popular everywhere and was widely available in apothecaries, alehouses, and grocers.
Smoking was not without powerful opponents. King James I of England likened smoking to almost devil worship and widely condemned it. He wrote in 1604: “tobacco is a filthy weed, and the custom is loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian [very dark] smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” James I is the king who beheaded Sir Raleigh for allegedly plotting against him.
Adapted from: Hancock, J.F. (2017) Chapter 6. Coffee: Religious stimulant to everyman’s drink. Plantation Crops: Power and plunder, Exploitation and Evolution. Routledge.
Illustration: “A Smoking Club” – one of Fairholt’s illustrations in Tobacco, its History and Association (1859).New York Public Library Digital Collection.
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