Tobacco

During the 16th century Europeans believed that tobacco, long used in many indigenous communities in the Americas, was a wonder drug that could cure various bodily ailments.

Before 1492 countless Native peoples across the Americas had smoked tobacco, often believing that the plant had sacred properties. As a result, smoking tobacco became a standard part of myriad rituals designed to propitiate the divine forces that governed the world. After Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they, too, believed that tobacco had special properties, although they tended to emphasize its medicinal and nutritional benefits instead of any connection to the world of spirits. Europeans who traveled to the Americas frequently commented on the value of using tobacco. Some believed that Indians drank the smoke from the burning weed; others were less clear about how users inhaled the product. Jean de Lery, the Huguenot who spent time among the TupiNAMBA of Brazil, noted that tobacco had nutritional properties and could cure certain physical ailments, including distilling “the superfluous humors from the brain.” The French royal cosmographer Andre Thevet, who claimed he watched Native peoples smoking in Brazil, testified that he could assure his readers that “having tried it, how good it is for purging the heart.”

By the late 16th century Europeans had begun to write systematic catalogs of the flora and fauna they encountered beyond the borders of their continent. Tobacco often took on a prominent role in these treatises. When Dr. Nicholas Monardes, a physician from Seville, published his account of the benefits of certain plants, he paid special attention to tobacco. The plant was, he argued, aesthetically pleasing and would thus be an excellent addition “to adornate Gardens” with its “fairnesse.” Monardes enumerated a number of tobacco’s alleged benefits, including its ability to cure headaches, uncomfortable intestinal gasses, menstrual cramps, respiratory and bowel problems suffered especially by the elderly and by children, toothaches, worms, and “griefes of the breast.” He also claimed that chewing tobacco provided enough nutrition for several days’ activities. Although his professions might seem far-fetched to a modern audience skepti-

Illustration of a tobacco plant and a man "drinking" it in Matthais de L'Obel's Plantarum sev stirpium historia (Amsterdam, 1576) (The Granger Collection)

Cal of such claims for any product, 16th-century Europeans were so keen to learn more about tobacco that Monardes’s account was published in Spanish, English, Latin, Italian, Flemish, and French. In the years following the publication of Monardes’s work, other Europeans, including Sir John Hawkins and Thomas Harriot, also described how the indigenous peoples of the Americas used tobacco.

Despite its obvious health benefits, some observers became alarmed at the rapidly spreading use of tobacco in Europe. Among the critics was King James I of England, who tried to crack down on the use of tobacco in his realm. However, try as he might to eradicate what he believed was a vice, the “sot weed” could not be removed from the goods that Europeans wanted from the Americas. That fact eventually saved the nascent colony of Jamestown when its existence seemed doubtful in the mid-1610s, and its success came only after English settlers there recognized that the region was ideal for the production of tobacco.

Tobacco became the most widely discussed plant in the Atlantic basin in the 16th century, but there was no consensus about its meaning. Many Europeans liked the sensations brought on by smoking, and as the knowledge about the plant spread—in books and pamphlets that extolled its appearance, in the shops of those who sold it, in pictures of smokers that proliferated by the dawn of the 17th century—an ever larger number became regular consumers of the plant. Its rising popularity then prompted a renewed effort on the part of some to reconsider whether consumption of tobacco was a good idea. Stories circulated that some became addicted to the plant and impoverished themselves in their pursuit of it. One writer held a mock trial of tobacco in England, weighing its pros and cons. Even after it had spread widely the medical community remained divided about the plant’s utility and the problems it posed. All the while, tobacco remained a mainstay among Native Americans, many of whom continued to chew it before battles, use it in poultices, or offer it in rituals designed to propitiate the spirits that governed their world.

Further reading: Rachel Doggett, ed., New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700 (Seattle: University of Washington Press for the Fol-ger Shakespeare Library, 1992); Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Peter C. Mancall, “Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” Environmental History 9 (2004), 648-678.