[In the following excerpt, Hamilton examines the changing medical and social attitudes to tobacco from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century and claims that tobacco was “the very worst gift of the New World to the Old.”]

There can be no doubt as to the American origin of tobacco, for it was cultivated in almost every place discovered, explored, or settled from Brazil to Canada; and it was shared with the intruders, whom the Indians gladly taught how to smoke it. Europeans saw it first, in the form of very crude cigars, in Cuba, where curiously the best tobacco in the world has been grown and some of the finest cigars have been made. Two members of the crew of Columbus on his first voyage caught the first glimpse.¹ Columbus took tobacco on his return to Spain, and his sailors doubtless took some too, along with rudimentary knowledge of how to smoke it.² Except for precious metals, no other American product was ever so joyfully accepted by Europeans.

Priority in introducing tobacco into France is controversial. André Thevet claimed in 1575 that he had brought tobacco seed from Brazil about 1556 and cultivated it at Angoulême before Jean Nicot, in Lisbon as ambassador from France in 1558-60, had sent tobacco and seed to Francis II and the Queen Mother. This claim has been denied by partisans of Nicot, whose name has survived in nicotiana. Yet Thevet brought from Brazil nicotiana tabacum, the kind universally used today; and Nicot, whose seed originally came from Florida, sent to France nicotiana rustica,³ a sort now little grown outside of Turkey. The weed may have been carried to England from the West Indies by John Hawkins about 1565⁴ and by Sir Francis Drake about five years later. There is a legend that Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco into England from America about 1585, and James I's insistence that tobacco was not brought to England by “King, great Conqueror, nor learned Doctor of Physicke”⁵ was aimed at Sir Walter and thus lends credence to the legend—it also casts doubt on the role of Sir Francis Drake, whose victory over the Invincible Armada undoubtedly made him a “great Conqueror.” Spanish soldiers of Charles V carried tobacco to Germany, and probably to Italy, early in the sixteenth century. And there are strong reasons to believe it reached both France and England through nameless soldiers, sailors, and travelers long before it did through Thevet, Nicot, Hawkins, or Raleigh. Portuguese mariners took tobacco to the coasts of Africa and Asia in the sixteenth century, and it quickly spread through the inland areas.⁶

In view of the harmful effects of tobacco, it is ironic that the introduction of tobacco in significant amounts into Spain and from there into other countries of Western Europe largely stemmed from its use as medicine. This was chiefly due to the pen of an outstanding Spanish physician. In 1571 Dr. Nicolás Monardes, a Sevillan physician and naturalist, published a book on medicinal plants coming into Spain from America,⁷ in which he made claims for the preventive and therapeutic power of tobacco that not only took the medical world by storm but influenced medical thought and practice for nearly a century. Though only the first chapter of 26 folios was on tobacco, and the second chapter of 32 folios was on sassafras, to which he also attributed incredible power, the book by Monardes was generally known as a treatise on tobacco.

Drawing on Indian lore, tales from returning colonists and his own fertile imagination, Monardes claimed that tobacco had cured or could cure: headache, migraine headache, rheumatism, pains in any part of the body, stomachache, asthama, shortness of breath, obstructions in the chest or intestines, gas pains, colic in children or adults, poisonous bites and stings, abscesses, carbuncles, tumors, fresh wounds, old sores, burns, chilblains, ringworm of the scalp and dropsy.⁸ Tobacco would also kill or expel worms, stop bleeding, and counteract poisons—even those deadly ones used by Carib Indians on their arrowheads that were destined to baffle medical science for generations. By slowly chewing little balls of tobacco Indians could walk for three or four days through desolate country without liquids or food and not suffer from thirst or hunger, and pellets of tobacco inserted in dental caries would kill the pain and stop the decay.⁹

Dissemination of Monardes' work on tobacco was not impeded by political or linguistic frontiers. In 1572 J. Gohory published at Paris his Instructions sur l'herbe petun, which is really a severe condensation of Monardes' chapter on tobacco translated into French. An Italian translation of Monardes on medical use of bezoar stone and black salsify, published in Venice in 1576, directed attention to Monardes, whose work on tobacco could be read in Spanish by educated Italians. In 1577 the 1574 edition of Monardes' work on tobacco and other drugs from America was “Englished,” as he put it, by John Frampton, with the engaging title Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde; it was published in London, and there were new editions in 1580 and 1596. The design and printing were excellent, and Frampton's prose style was much livelier and more readable than the original or any other translation. In their first edition (1570) of L'agriculture et la maison rustique, Dr. Charles Étienne and Dr. Jean Liebault only related the few cures of ulcers, skin diseases, and one wound that Nicot claimed for tobacco, and said that tobacco ointment would be useful in treating wounds, and smoke would clear up congestion in the head. But, clearly drawing upon Monardes, Dr. Liebault, the surviving author, greatly expanded the therapeutic claims for tobacco in the 1602 edition.¹⁰ In 1623 Olivier de Serres presented a list of ailments that tobacco would cure¹¹ resembling the catalogue by Monardes. Medical tracts in Great Britain in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and in 1601-02 repeated and enlarged Monardes' claims for tobacco by adding gout and syphilis, and by even saying it would keep a man awake and put him to sleep, sharpen his appetite, and suppress his hunger!

These exaggerated claims incited A Counterblaste to Tobacco by James I in 1604, the most famous broadside against the narcotic until the last two decades. Attacking swiftly, in his preface James said: “There cannot be a more base, and yet hurtfull, corruption in a Countrey than is the vile use (or rather abuse) of taking tobacco in this Kingdome.” Against the argument “that the whole people would not have” liked tobacco so much if it had not been good for them, the king said that was only the “foolish affectation of a noveltie.” James I also said many men had smoked themselves to death, and history leaves no doubt that he was right. He maintained it was patently absurd to claim tobacco would cure all sorts of diseases and to ignore its bad side effects, which every drug has. Prescriptions of medicine must be adjusted to age, condition, and specific ailments. Yet it was alleged that tobacco would cure all sorts of diseases (“as never any drugge could do before”). If tobacco were good for one disease, should it be used for all diseases by all men at all times? If one ate the best nourishment as often as tobacco is taken, it would make his body feeble and his spirits dull. “The Indians themselves offer no price for a slave to be sold whom they find to be a great tobacco taker.” Some members of the English gentry were ruining themselves economically by spending £300 or £400 a year “upon this precious stinke.” The king pointed out that nonsmokers were being injured by unavoidable inhalation of tobacco smoke—something we have recognized only in the last few years. He also complained that human breath was being fouled by this “stinking smoke” and that it was a great injustice for a husband to force his wife to spoil her own breath by smoking herself or to “resolve to live in a perpetuall stinking torment.”

In the final paragraph of the Counterblaste King James asks: “Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received, and so grossely mistaken? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods. …” And in his final sentence James I characterizes smoking as: “A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.” Long live the king!

Skillful as he was with his pen, James I did not confine his war on tobacco to rhetoric. Despite dire need for revenue, on 17 October 1604 he raised the customs duty on tobacco from 2d. per pound to 6s. 10d., or by 4,000 percent, for the explicit purpose of keeping out all imports except the tiny amount needed by people “of the better sort” who could be trusted to use it in moderation.¹²

Charles I also opposed tobacco, and Cromwell disliked it too; but it was so firmly entrenched by this time that he tempered his opposition to avoid driving people into royalism. In 1613 Louis XIII restricted sales of tobacco in France to apothecaries, but no ruler was powerful enough to check its progress. Even a death penalty failed to work in Russia and in Persia, where the sultan sometimes executed offenders with his own hand.¹³

By 1660 many physicians and some educated laymen realized that tobacco had precious little, if any, medicinal value.¹⁴ Yet during the Great Plague of 1665 some people used snuff against it, and every day the school boys at Eton were forced to smoke tobacco to ward it off. One lad said never in his life had he been whipped so hard as he was for not smoking.¹⁵ This regimen must have lasted long enough to make some tobacco addicts at a very tender age.

In the second half of the seventeenth century use of tobacco increased phenomenally, and by the end of this period governmental opposition had ceased almost everywhere. From shortly after its foundation to the Revolution, Virginia was a tobacco colony, and Maryland was nearly so. English imports of tobacco from Virginia rose from 2,300 pounds in 1615-16 to 14,395,635 pounds in 1689, or 6,000-fold. Though much less sensationally, the trend of tobacco imports into England continued upward until the end of the colonial period. Processing these imports for domestic consumption and for re-export employed thousands of English workers. London also benefited from manufacturing pipes for England and other countries.¹⁶ About 1630 Englishmen began teaching the Dutch how to make pipes, and by 1750 there were 374 masters and 7,000 workers engaged in pipe-making in Gouda.¹⁷

Other aspects of commerce enjoyed a similar expansion. Though prohibited by the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, trade between the Clyde and the tobacco colonies “was well established in the early years of the Restoration and by the last decade of the century had become quite extensive.” Glasgow enjoyed a near monopoly of the Scottish imports of tobacco and an enormous share of the exports. Investment of capital accumulated in the flourishing tobacco trade was an important factor in the industrial development of Scotland. The manufacture of coarse cloth for slaves and of agricultural tools, and the building of ships to carry them to Virginia and Maryland and bring back tobacco, contributed strongly to the economic growth and welfare of Glasgow.¹⁸

Use of the new narcotic was rapidly becoming commonplace. In 1631 an English writer said that “at this day [tobacco is] commonly used by most men and many women,”¹⁹ and in 1788 the author of the French Academy's prize-winning essay said that tobacco was a necessity even for paupers.²⁰ These authors exaggerated the prevalence of tobacco, though it was certainly the most widely used of all narcotics; for the only forms common at that time were cigars, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco, and snuff. Cigars were handmade and too expensive for popular use, and none of the others appealed strongly enough to “hook” a large part of the population anywhere. But little paper-wrapped cigars called cigarillos, or cigarettes in French and English, were destined to revolutionize production, consumption, and mortality.

Tobacco was the very worst gift of the New World to the Old. …

Notes

1. José Rivero Muñiz, Tabaco: Su historia en Cuba (Havana 1964) 2-8; Samuel E. Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (2 vols. Boston 1942) 1. 342.

2. Cf. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (New York 1947) 72-73.

3. Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault, L'agriculture et la maison rustique (Paris 1570) fols. 79, 81. Dr. Charles Etienne (modernized spelling) died while writing this book, and his son-in-law Dr. Jean Liebault wrote a substantial portion while completing it, as the preface discloses. So I am ascribing joint authorship to him, as he did to his late father-in-law in revised editions. The Missouri Botanical Gardens, Saint Louis, kindly and quickly made this rare edition accessible.

4. Samuel E. Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600 (New York 1971) 428.

5. James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London 1604) fol. B2. The Huntington Library has kindly and quickly made this exceedingly rare edition accessible.

6. C. M. MacInnes, The Early English Tobacco Trade (London 1926) 1-3.

7. Nicolás Bautista Monardes, Segvnda parte del libro de las cosas qve se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que siruen al vso de medicina. Do[nde] se trata del tabaco y de la sassafras … (Seville 1571).

8. Ibid., fols. 6-11.

9. Ibid., fols. 12-25.

10. Estienne and Liebault (n. [3] above) 79-81; (Paris 1602) 123-127.

11. Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de l'agriculture et mesnage des champs (Rouen 1623) 572-573, 866.

12. The Workes of his Most High and Mighty Prince, James, King of Great Britain (London 1616) 224.

13. MacInnes (n. [6] above) 24-26; Berthold Laufer, Introduction of Tobacco into Europe, Field Museum of Natural History, Anthropology Leaflet 19 (Chicago 1924) 62-63.

14. Cf. George L. Beer, The Old Colonial System (2 vols. New York 1912) 1. 139.

15. Laufer (n. [13] above) 44-45.

16. MacInnes (n. 49 above) 150-152.

17. J. J. Kerks, De Geschiedenis van de Amersfoorte Tabak (The Hague 1967) 33-34.

18. Henry Hamilton, Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford 1963) 250-271.

19. Cf. MacInnes (n. 49 above) 47-48; Laufer (n. 56 above) 16-17.

20. Discours Composé en 1788, qui a remporté le Prix à l'Académic Françoise en 1792; sur la question: Quelle a été l'influence de l'Amérique Sur la Politique, le commerce, et les moeurs de l'Europe? (Paris 1792) 24.