Tobacco

Tobacco first attracted attention in Europe as an Amerindian curiosity. Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Jacques Cartier, and other European explorers reported the apparently omnipresent but varied use of a green herb by the people they encountered. For recreational, spiritual, and medicinal reasons, tobacco was externally applied to wounds, chewed (alone or with other substances), inhaled as a powder, or smoked (through canes, as rolled up leaves, or stuffed into a reed or a pipe). In the mid-sixteenth century, European scholars described the strange New World plant as part of the botanical renaissance. By the late 1560s, tobacco's medicinal properties were being widely investigated by people such as Conrad Gessner in Zurich, Pietro Mattioli in Bohemia and, most famously, by the French ambassador to Lisbon, Jean Nicot. In 1571, Nicolas Monardes, a physician of Seville, presented an influential assessment of the medical use of Nicotiana. His text, the English translation of which was entitled Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde (1577), became a standard medical textbook across Europe. Monardes told physicians that tobacco had antiseptic and analgesic properties and could tackle a host of conditions from chilblains to intestinal worms and from halitosis to gout. Tobacco was used in a variety of ointments and poultices, formulas, and concoctions.

Smokers and Smoking
While European science was discovering the medicinal potential of tobacco, Europeans in the New World were experimenting with more medicinally ambiguous patterns and modes of ingestion by smoking, snuffing, and chewing tobacco as part of their everyday lives. By 1550 smoking was prevalent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial outposts. Sailors and adventurers returning from the New World brought their tobacco-consuming habits back with them to European ports. Particularly in London in the 1590s, putting dried leaves from a faraway land "in a pipe set on fire and suckt into the stomacke, and thrust foorth again at the nosthrils" became a popular pastime (Gerard, p. 287). Smokers such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe made smoking fashionable, particularly in male society. Numerous depictions of smoking soon appeared in poems and plays, such as Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour (1600), in which smoking was often seen as a gentlemanly recreation. Perceptions of women smoking were generally negative but, as numerous seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and plays such as Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1611) illustrate, some women did smoke.

Smoking spread in England as a social activity (often in alehouses) and was commonly referred to as "drinking" tobacco. The practice quickly became controversial, prompting a medical and moral debate in the early seventeenth century. Smokers proclaimed tobacco's medicinal benefits: "nothing that harmes a man inwardly from his girdle upward, but may be taken away with a moderate use of Tabacco" (Chute, p. 19). Critics such as King James I & VI, who wrote A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, condemned smokers for their wanton abuse of the new medicine and for their patently non-medicinal, wasteful, and apparently compulsive consumption. Smoking had been identified as a vice. English physicians, while confirming the medicinal power of tobacco, warned against unnecessary and excessive smoking because it could disrupt humoral balance, provoking death "before either Nature urge, Maladie enforce, or Age require it" (Gardiner). Some commentators argued that smoking bred soot and cobwebs in the body, leading to enfeeblement, infertility, and a thirst for alcohol.

Despite such warnings, in the first half of the seventeenth century smoking and other recreational forms of tobacco use continued to spread in England and across Europe. The Dutch were particularly avid smokers and were soon growing tobacco and manufacturing distinctive pipes, such as the meerschaum. In France, state-regulated tobacco cultivation supplied French smokers and snuff-takers. By 1650, the use of tobacco as a medicine was widely accepted throughout Europe, but in many countries attempts were made to curb its recreational use. In Sicily, the pipe was declared illegal. In Denmark, Sweden, parts of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary attempts were made to prohibit smoking, prevent tobacco cultivation, and inhibit its importation. The Russian patriarch considered smoking a deadly sin and in 1634 banned it on pain of execution for persistent offenders. In 1642, following a complaint by the dean of Seville that the entrance to his church was being defiled by tobacco juice, Pope Urban VIII threatened both clergy and congregation with excommunication if they smoked, chewed, or snuffed tobacco in church. Pope Innocent X issued another antismoking bull in 1650.

Tobacco and Economies
Persistent and growing demand for tobacco in Europe promoted increasing crop cultivation in the New World. Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonies thrived by exporting vast quantities of the plant grown by slaves and indentured servants on large plantations. In 1626, 500,000 pounds of Virginia tobacco reached England. By the late 1630s, millions of pounds of tobacco were being shipped each year from Virginia, Maryland, and the English Caribbean, much of it re-exported to mainland Europe and beyond. As production increased, prices fell, making tobacco more readily available to all social classes. The growing international trade in tobacco attracted mercantile investment and presented governments with tax-raising opportunities. In England, where tobacco growing had been prohibited since 1619 (to aid colonial producers), substantial revenues were generated from customs and other duties on tobacco. Ongoing complaints about the dangers of smoking to body and soul were subsumed by the vested interests of the governments, colonists, and merchants responsible for supplying tobacco to consumers.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans continued to find medical uses for tobacco and to consume it for pleasure. Ornate tobacco pipes and snuffboxes were produced, offering opportunities for the display of status and refinement. In eighteenth-century England, snuff became particularly popular. Later, the cigars favored by Spanish consumers distinguished the gentlemen from the more plebeian smokers of clay pipes. Whatever the status of the consumer or the mode of ingestion, tobacco had become as integrated into European culture and society as it had been in pre-Columbian America. Like tea, coffee, and sugar, tobacco had become an integral part of European lifestyles.