Peter C. Mancall

Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe

THERE IS PERHAPS no plant more thoroughly studied than tobacco. Historians, economists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and botanists have all offered assessments of the plant and its history.¹ They have focused on its initial spread from the Western Hemisphere to the rest of the world—often noting persistent beliefs that the plant was a panacea, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Europeans became obsessed with it. Some have explored the political debates that the plant engendered. Others have considered its role in indigenous practices in the Americas, including detailed accounts of the pipes used to smoke it. Some have linked its use to the spread of other psychoactive substances. One enterprising early twentieth-century bibliophile filled five enormous volumes with references to the plant's history.² Though other plants have attracted much attention—including sugar, potatoes, corn, cacao, and tulips—no other plant has played such a public (and publicly debated) role in the history of the world in the past five hundred years.³

Despite the wealth of material about tobacco, however, scholars have not adequately explored the process by which tobacco became a commodity and thus part of world history. The spread of tobacco was part of a larger migration of plants that attended European exploration and settlement in the Western Hemisphere. But scholars have neglected a key facilitator of that migration—the rise of printed books. The rapid expansion of print was perfectly timed to allow early modern authors to spread news about the benefits of particular plants, as the authors of early modern herbals knew when they provided listings of medical afflictions and then sent readers to the plants that could help alleviate suffering.⁴ The rapid dissemination of books across the continent also proved crucial for tobacco's quick integration into European societies.

Because the arrival of tobacco and other American plants in Europe coincided with the vast expansion of print, newly arriving flora were able to enter into European cultures through the circulation of printed books. Within months of Columbus's return from the Western Hemisphere, his report had reached far-flung audiences, with ten separate editions printed in 1493 alone. By 1497, publishers in Barcelona, Rome, Antwerp, Paris, Basel, Strasburg, and Valladolid had circulated editions in Spanish, Latin, and German.⁵ While not all European travelers to the Western Hemisphere wrote about their journeys, a surprising number did. Many of these reports spread initially in the traveler's own society and language. But as the history of Columbus's first report demonstrates, enterprising printers saw a market in translations of practically every account that provided details about the Americas. The best of those reports included pictures as well as text, thereby giving readers a visual sense of what American flora looked like.

The appearance of tobacco in such works did not mean that it would be automatically accepted by Europeans or that it would necessarily become part of the process that Alfred Crosby has elegantly labeled the "Columbian Exchange." Many Europeans who saw tobacco used by Native Americans in the sixteenth century associated the plant with heathen rituals, though many also observed indigenous peoples employing tobacco in less obviously threatening ways as well.

The conversion of tobacco from its use in American ritual to its employment in European medicine and leisure seems to fit a model well known to environmental historians. Given tobacco's enormous role in the development of the Anglo-American economy and its rapid diffusion around the world, it would seem an ideal example of one aspect of the Columbian Exchange: a product available in one part of the world soon found markets everywhere when merchants recognized the commercial benefits of the new commodity. Tobacco's commercial success suggests that Europeans had discovered yet another product that could, in the words of the seventeenth-century historian Edward Johnson, "turn a mart." In the world view of Johnson (and other Puritans), Providence had been responsible for the remarkable economic ascent of the New England colonies.⁶ Environmental historians, of course, normally eschew explanations that pivot on the unfolding of a divine plan. The astonishing success of William Cronon's Changes In The Land, first published two decades ago, suggests the continued popularity of a materialist perspective which views American flora and fauna as commodities awaiting colonial and European consumers.⁷ Tobacco fits this paradigm, or so it seems.

But tobacco was not like other plants that rose in popularity in the early modern age. It arrived in Europe with cultural baggage from Native America, and its migration across the Atlantic tells a very particular tale. Unlike other natural resources harvested from the Americas, tobacco could not be incorporated into the European market until news of its potential had spread beyond those who initially observed the plant and witnessed its appeal. Given the inherent tension between Europeans' frequent condemnations of Native Americans and their religions and Europeans' longstanding desire to adopt useful plants, what needs explanation is how tobacco managed to cross the cultural divide. Specifically, we need to know how its benefits came to outweigh its demonic origins.⁸ The crucial ingredient in this process was the printed book—herbals, travel accounts, and eventually treatises on the plant itself. Printed books allowed Europeans to make tobacco their own through a process that anthropologists have called "commodity indigenization" or "commodity fetishism."⁹ Books facilitated the divorce between the plant and its Native American spiritual trappings, effectively desacralizing it so that it could be integrated into the European market despite the protests of those who saw its unholy origins as a sign of its fundamentally flawed character. The printed book was vital for tobacco's acceptance because the plant, previously unknown to Europeans, was unexpected and thus needed to be explained. Tobacco was in this sense the opposite of precious metals, which Europeans desperately sought in the Americas, or pelts, which Europeans had always valued but which had become scarce in the Old World.¹⁰ Those were known commodities that Europeans sought in the Western Hemisphere. Though tobacco's migration across the Atlantic was part of the Columbian Exchange, its integration into new societies shows how complicated that process could be. The spread of tobacco reveals the central role that printed books played in Europeans' evolving understanding of the American environment.¹¹

Tobacco Arrives in Europe

OVER THE COURSE of the sixteenth century, Europeans across the continent learned about a vast variety of American plants, including many that had no counterpart within Europe, from both travel accounts and printed herbals. Though the illustrations in some early printed books lacked the accuracy of the drawings or paintings on which they were based, by the mid-sixteenth century—when mention of tobacco had become more common in Europe—printers had begun to produce a new generation of herbals with the more precise illustrations needed by explorers in the field.¹² Printers did not yet have the ability to reproduce images in color, but the engravings in many volumes nonetheless conveyed through line and shading what new species looked like.

From the moment when tobacco first captured Europeans' imaginations, it was obvious that this was a different kind of plant. After all, as the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch put it, "[o]f all the pleasure goods that entered European civilization at the dawn of the modern age, tobacco is undoubtedly the most bizarre." The novelty of the plant can be found in Europeans' initial inability to describe smoking in a modern sense; they used terms such as "drinking tobacco" and "drinking smoke."¹³ Its unusual characteristics made it a logical plant for study, and it often was depicted in printed books. Tobacco's appearance in such works was crucial since, as the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has phrased it, "visual images have a special capacity to convey truth that words do not."¹⁴ The exotic plant, previously unknown on the continent, fascinated European readers trying to make sense of the New World's flora.¹⁵ The ablest interpreters realized that tobacco and other unknown plants arriving in Europe on ships from the Western Hemisphere represented a challenge to a view of nature that had survived since antiquity, when the Roman naturalist Pliny and the Greek physician Dioscordes in the first century C.E. offered a supposedly definitive enumeration of the species of plants and animals known in Europe, Africa, and Asia. As one scholar has noted recently, the number of plants described in European herbals increased from the five hundred listed by Dioscordes and reaffirmed by the herbalist Leonhart Fuchs in 1542 to six thousand in the botanist Caspar Bauhin's herbal in 1623.¹⁶ Yet none of those plants attracted as much attention among European printers as tobacco. From its initial reception as an herb used in Native American rituals to its promotion as a cure for all sorts of diseases to its eventual condemnation as a weed that caused moral turpitude, tobacco elicited a startling range of deeply felt responses in early modern Europe.¹⁷

When Europeans first encountered tobacco, they learned about a plant that had a long pedigree in the Western Hemisphere. Countless groups of Native Americans had used tobacco since time immemorial. European observers recorded its use by at least fifty distinct North American peoples before 1660, often noting that natives employed it in precise ritual settings. Many native peoples believed that tobacco was a gift from powerful deities who would respond whenever humans burned or smoked it in religious rituals. Indigenous peoples across the Americas benefited from tobacco in healing practices and rituals designed to propitiate the gods who controlled the movement of game or the success of a year's crop. The tobacco they consumed was sufficiently potent to trigger or intensify hallucinations possibly caused by other narcotics, which made its sacred attributes more obvious to those seeking contact with spiritual forces. Natives employed tobacco in a variety of healing rituals; as one historian of the plant has noted, "there was hardly an ailment for which tobacco was not prescribed somewhere in the New World—asthma, rheumatism, chills, fevers, convulsions, eye sores, intestinal disorders, worms, childbirth pains, headaches, boils, cysts, coughs, catarrh and so on." Some even took it rectally, as one mid-sixteenth-century Aztec herbal recommended. Even the most obviously social uses of tobacco, such as the smoking by Aztec elites after dinner, took place in carefully created and maintained cultural settings. The astonishing pipes found by archaeologists across North America, many of them subtly carved effigies, testify to both the ubiquity of tobacco and its sacred functions.¹⁸

Tobacco first entered the collective understanding of Europeans in the wake of Columbus's voyages. During his first trip, Columbus witnessed natives in the West Indies carrying, he wrote, "burning coals in order to make fire with which to burn certain perfumed herbs that they had with them."¹⁹ In the years that followed, other European explorers in the Americas found natives saving or using tobacco. European readers learned about tobacco from Martin Waldseemüller's account of Amerigo Vespucci's travels in his Cosmographie Introductio, published in 1507. Traveling through the islands, Vespucci reported that he and his men encountered a group of natives who, he wrote, "were animal like in their appearance and actions, and had their mouths full of a certain green herb which they continually chewed upon as animals chew their cud, with the result that they could not speak." After confessing that the Europeans could not discern the natives' "secret"—their reason for chewing the plant which the men always kept with them in gourds suspended around their necks—Vespucci later deduced that they chewed the herb along with flour "to quench their thirst."²⁰

The most prominent early European commentators on America described tobacco use by natives in works published before the middle of the sixteenth century.²¹ Reading those texts now, we can discern stark tensions between those who wanted to promote the use of tobacco for its medicinal purposes and others who wanted to suppress tobacco by stressing its link to Native American rituals. That is, tobacco had multiple possible meanings, and the texts reflected the goals and opinions of authors or their intended audiences. Pietro Martire D'Anghiera (known to English audiences as Peter Martyr), who became the most significant chronicler of Columbus's expeditions, described a kind of snuff (which he termed Chohóbba) with narcotic effects and wrote that the "preestes and divines" engaged in rituals in which "they drynke the pouder of a certeyne herbe, by whose qualitie they are driven into a furye" and "lerne many thynges by revelation." Though that substance was in all likelihood not tobacco, early commentators conflated the two into one.²² Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, the Spanish natural historian who made six round-trip crossings of the Atlantic to Hispaniola and Panama from the late fifteenth century to the early decades of the sixteenth century, provided an elaborate description of the use of tobacco and a small picture of the kind of pipe that the Americans used to smoke it. Smoking tobacco was a "very evil thing" that the natives claimed was "not only a very healthy but also a very holy thing to do," something that resembled "a vicious and evil custom of the Thracian people"; even local Christians suffering from syphilis used it, because "they are so taken out of their minds that they do not feel the pains of their illness."²³ Jacques Cartier, whose travels in the 1530s represented the most important French effort in the Americas in the sixteenth century, noted that the men he met at Hochelaga (adjacent to modern-day Montreal) carried dried tobacco around their necks and used pipes to "fill their bodies full of smoke, till that it commeth out of their mouth and nostrils, even as out of the Tonnel of a Chimny." The French imitated them, but "it seemed that they had filled it with Pepper dust, it is so hote."²⁴ In 1552, the earliest specific mention of tobacco in an herbal appeared in a Nahuatl manuscript known as Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis, though that work remained unpublished until the twentieth century.²⁵ These accounts provided literate Europeans with access to books giving ample testimony that tobacco was widely used in indigenous ritual in the Americas. In these texts, tobacco facilitated savage practices.

But despite the early association of tobacco with heathens and their rituals—an association that would have been obvious to anyone with any deep knowledge of Mexican and Central American cultures—not all who came upon the herb were repulsed by its uses.²⁶ Some Europeans who traveled in the Western Hemisphere were eager to see how they might use it. The unknown author of the "Histoire Naturelle Des Indes," known to modern audiences as "The Drake Manuscript" and now residing in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, provided a beautiful illustration of tobacco ("petun") and briefly described its attributes. Tobacco in the West Indies was, he wrote, a "special herb which the Indians use for food as well as an extremely beneficial medicine; when they are sick, they breathe in the smoke by mouth with a straw; soon the ill humor escapes by vomiting." He reported that the Americans "often pulverize it and, putting it in their noses, it distills several drops of water from the brain to discharge it. It also is found very helpful for toothache; laying its leaves on the teeth, the pain disappears; it is also beneficial for alleviating eye problems and, for this [purpose], it is advisable to take the herb and seep it in water about half of a quarter of an hour and then wash one's eye and one will experience its benefit."²⁷ One illustration depicted a bleeding victim of an arrow attack lying on a hammock while another person burned plants so that the smoke traveled up a tube to the wound itself. "When the fire is lighted," the author reported, the natives "put in it a leaf of tobacco together with a resin called balsam and as soon as the smoke enters the wound of the patient, they take a leaf of tobacco with some of the balsam and make a plaster which they apply to the wound of the patient, and he is cured."²⁸

Europeans who ventured to the mainland also left instructive descriptions of how Americans used tobacco. They recognized its practical uses, which they often described in detail, as well as its purported spiritual power. The Huguenot Jean de Léry, famed for establishing the first Protestant mission in South America, recognized that the Tupinambas of Brazil "greatly prized" tobacco and had discovered how to use and profit from it. After his journey in the mid-1550s, Léry reported that the Tupinambas first dried tobacco leaves in their houses and then "took four or five leaves of it, and wrap them in another big leaf of a tree, like a spice coronet. Then they set the small end of it on fire, and, putting it slightly lit into their mouths, they draw on the smoke, which, though it comes back out through the nostrils and through their pierced lips, nonetheless sustains them so well that if they go off to war, and necessity presses them, they will go three or four days without nourishing themselves on anything else." Tobacco also had medicinal benefits, distilling "the superfluous humors from the brain." Given its attributes, it was no wonder that Léry claimed that most Tupinambas carried tobacco with them. (Léry added that he could not figure out what benefits the plant brought to women.) Lest anyone believe that these were just tall tales told by natives to newcomers, Léry informed his readers that he had smoked tobacco himself and "it seemed to satisfy and ward off hunger."²⁹ Later he added that the Indians used tobacco in a ritual during war with their enemies, with one blowing smoke on the others to give them power over their foes.³⁰

The French royal cosmographer André Thevet also saw natives in the Western Hemisphere smoke tobacco. In the 1570s they carried what they called petun with them, "for that they esteeme it marvelous profitable for many things." They dried the leaves carefully in their houses after they picked it, and then wrapped "a quantitie of this hearbe being dry in a leafe of a Palme tree which is very great, & so they make rolles of the length of a ca[n]dle, & than they fire the one end, and receive the smoke thereof by their nose and by their mouthe." The Americans told him that consuming tobacco in this way "is very holesome to clense & consume the superfluous humors of the brain." It also warded off hunger and thirst. But tobacco had more than practical applications. When the natives met in council they smoked it. Women tended to avoid it, he claimed, since smoking could make them faint if they indulged too heavily. Thevet also claimed that Christians living among the Americans had developed a passion for tobacco, though he warned, based on his own experience, that initial use could cause "sweates and weakenesse, even to fall into a Syncope."³¹

When they returned to France, Léry and Thevet published accounts of their travels, and their views on tobacco joined a growing body of information about the weed circulating in Europe.³² By the late sixteenth century, illustrations in printed books provided Europeans with actual views of tobacco-smoking Americans; one early image demonstrates Europeans' belief that Indians seemed to drink the smoke as if it was a liquid.³³ Thevet's own book contained illustrations of two different uses of tobacco: in a family setting with no obvious sacred function, and as part of a ritual whose depiction offered vivid proof of the Americans' savagery (see Fig. 1).³⁴ By the end of the century the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry, perhaps best known to American readers as the man who engraved John White's watercolors of Roanoke for the 1590 edition of Thomas Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, added one of the most significant images of Native American tobacco use. For his America Tertia Pars, published in Frankfurt in 1593, he engraved an image of Tupinambas engaged in a ritual dance (see Fig. 2). The picture illustrated a chapter of Léry's text which described the religion of the "American Barbarians" (Barbaros Americanos), and it followed another engraving which depicted demons torturing natives. In both the written and visual contexts, the image of tobacco being used in a ritual linked it with desperate heathenism. As the engraving reveals, two of the three men in the middle of the circle blow tobacco toward the dancers who encircle them. All of the central figures scowl or stare in a threatening manner, while those on the outside look toward the ground. De Bry inserted three European men into the top right corner of the image, presumably discussing the spectacle they are witnessing. None of those Europeans possesses tobacco. De Bry also included the chants sung by the natives during the ritual, a series of words set to a simple melodic line—"Heu herua heura heura heura heura heura heura ouech"—that would have made no sense to any European reader at the time.³⁵

Figure 1. A European View of American Savagery.
Naked Native Americans, beasts of the jungle (monkey and parrot), strange practices, and smoking tobacco—from André Thevet, Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1558).

Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 2. Ritual Tobacco Use in Brazil.
This ritual was witnessed by three European men, who are partially visible in the upper right corner. From Theodor de Bry, Americae Tertia Pars (1592).

Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Confronted with such evidence, it would have been understandable if Europeans had looked at tobacco as so inextricably entwined with heathenish practice that they would want nothing to do with the plant. After all, as numerous texts informed European readers, many Native Americans remained in the thrall of the devil, who increasingly battled the spread of Christianity to the Western Hemisphere. Given the perceived ubiquity of demonic forces across Europe in the sixteenth century—evident, for example, in both witch hunts and texts that helped the wary identify evil in their midst—any European would have been tempting fate to meddle with the mysterious plant.³⁶ Sixteenth-century observers' fascination with the plant and their insistent desire to give it meaning in native context transformed tobacco from a product of nature to a product of culture. Despite its apparent benefits, tobacco had become a signifier of exotic, savage, and demonic forces. For it to have any future in Europe, those who promoted the plant's use would need to find ways to stress tobacco's virtues and minimize or obscure its direct link to savagery. They needed to reassure readers and potential consumers that the use of tobacco by Europeans would not, as Oviedo had noted about the indigenous people of Hispaniola in 1535, drive them "out of their senses."³⁷

The Book on Tobacco

TOBACCO ITSELF was incapable of making Europeans adopt it. In addition to the fact that it was inanimate, it was also, at least at first, culturally mute: Since it played no role in European societies before the sixteenth century, it had no intrinsic appeal. To make the leap from unknown plant to highly desired good—to go through the process of commodification and hence become suitable for the market—humans had to become involved. Though the leading intellectual effort in this promotional task fell to those who could articulate tobacco's benefits for human health, an equally conspicuous role fell to printers who harnessed the potential of their still relatively new technology to advertise the novel commodity.

The ideal proponent of tobacco was someone who could celebrate its virtues and spread the news far. Perhaps none embraced the dual aspects of this task as enthusiastically as Nicholas Monardes, a physician from Seville who in 1574 published a medical history of the Western Hemisphere.³⁸ Translated into English and printed in London in 1577 with the title Joyfull Newes out of the newfound world, Monardes claimed that tobacco was an ideal "hearbe of much antiquitie" that had been long familiar to American Indians, who taught its virtues to Spanish explorers. After describing where tobacco grew best and noting that it had recently been imported to Spain for its aesthetic pleasures—"more to adornate Gardens with the fairnesse thereof, and to [give] a pleasaunt light, than that it was thought to have mervellous medicinable virtues" —Monardes enumerated the properties of the plant.³⁹ "This hearbe Tabaco hath particular vertue to heale griefes of the head, and in especially comming to colde causes, and so it cureth the headake when it commeth of a cold humor, or of a windy cause." Monardes instructed his readers that in the case of headaches caused by "a cold humor," the "Leaves must be layde hotte to the griefe, and multiplying the tyme that is needful, until the griefe be taken away."⁴⁰

But lest readers get the impression that tobacco had only one benefit, Monardes quickly enumerated its many other medicinal virtues; in each instance, as with headaches, he instructed readers how to apply the plant to the affliction. Thus tobacco was useful for "griefes of the breast" where "it worketh a marvellous effect, & in especially those that doe cast out mater and rottennesse at the mouth, and in them that are short breathed, and in any other olde eviles" if the patient made a "decoction" with sugar and syrup and took it "in little quantitie"; those who smoked tobacco had the added advantage of the plant enabling them to clear their chests since "the smoke being taken in at the mouth, doeth cause that the matter be expelled out of the breast of that do featch their breath shorte." Applied properly, tobacco could cure ailing stomachs; relieve those who suffered from "griefes of windes"; soothe "the griefe of women, which is called the evill of the Mother" if tobacco was laid properly on the navel; solve respiratory and bowel problems in children and the elderly; eliminate worms and problems associated with "cold swellings," toothaches, and "venemous wounds." Besides its ability to cure bodily afflictions, tobacco also could relieve weariness and provide sustenance when food and water were lacking, as explorers had observed among Native Americans.⁴¹

The rapid translation of Monardes's account from Spanish into Latin, English, Italian, French, and Flemish and the fact that herbalists relied on his text in their own works suggested that his book had an appeal across the continent.⁴² Even the English, slow to understand the significance of the Western Hemisphere, eventually became avid consumers of tobacco and texts about its uses. They had no knowledge of tobacco until 1555, when readers of Richard Eden's translation of Pietro Martyr D'Anghiera's account learned about powerful dried herbs that natives on Hispaniola used in cures and which caused hallucinations.⁴³ But in the next generation English readers could find various accounts about tobacco, including firsthand reports of English travelers to the Americas.⁴⁴ As early as 1585 English sailors on their way to the mainland traded for tobacco on Isabella (north of Hispaniola), along with livestock, sugar, and ginger "and such like commodities of the Iland."⁴⁵ One English author, responding to a period of famine in the mid-1590s, told readers how tobacco could help them to make do in times of dearth. Along with suggestions about how poor men could make cheap liquor if they could not afford malt and how to brew beer without hops, readers learned that travelers had seen how others "make little balles of the juice of the hearbe Tabaco, and the ashes of cockle shells wrought up together, and dryed in the shadowe, and in their travaile they place one of these balles betweene their neather lip, and their teeth, sucking the same continually, and letting downe the moisture, and it keepeth them both from hunger and thirst for the space of three or foure daies."⁴⁶ By the late sixteenth century, tobacco had become sufficiently known in England to appear in poetry, most notably a passing reference in book three of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, first published in 1590.⁴⁷

The appearance in Frankfurt of an illustrated edition of Thomas Harriot's Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia signaled a decisive moment in the way that printers promoted tobacco use among Europeans. Unlike most accounts by travelers to the Americas, Harriot's book appeared simultaneously in English, French, German, and Latin in 1590.⁴⁸ Harriot, one of the leaders of the English settlement at Roanoke in the mid-1580s, had actually seen tobacco growing in America with his own eyes and he had witnessed Carolina Algonquians using it. He wrote that the natives "use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade; from whence it purgeth superfluous fleame & other grosse humors, openeth all the pores & passages of the body: by which meanes the use thereof, not only preserveth the body from obstructions; but also if any be, so that they have not beene of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them." Such use had obvious benefits. "[T]heir bodies are notably preserved in health," Harriot concluded, "& know not many greevuous diseases wherewithall wee in England are oftentimes afflicted."⁴⁹

The Algonquians had other uses of tobacco as well. According to Harriot, they employed it to communicate with the spiritual forces that guided their world. The tobacco was "of so precious estimation amongest the[m], that they thinke their gods are marvelously delighted therwith," he wrote. As a result, the natives used tobacco to propitiate their deities. "[B]eing in a storme uppon the waters, to pacifie their gods, they cast some up into the aire and into the water," he claimed. They did the same thing when blessing a weir set up to catch fish. Whenever they needed "an escape of danger," they used tobacco. Harriot found their rituals primitive—"all done with strange gestures," as he put it, "stamping, sometime dauncing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, & staring up into the heavens, uttering therewithal and chattering strange words & noises."⁵⁰

Harriot's text tells much about the way that tobacco began to enter European societies at the end of the sixteenth century. The publication was arranged by the younger Richard Hakluyt, who was emerging by the end of the 1580s as the most prominent promoter of the English colonization of North America. He worked with de Bry on the edition; Hakluyt himself did some of the translations from the original English into Latin. Though Frankfurt might have made sense as a place to publish the book because of the city's prominent place in the sixteenth-century printed book industry, Frankfurt was hardly a center for colonial activities or the home of many explorers. Instead, what its printers offered was the ability to produce a text with high-quality illustrations. To be sure, those who published the book had more on their minds than promoting the tobacco trade. Harriot's text described the entire environment of modern-day coastal North Carolina as well as the practices of its human occupants. It is less important as a work on tobacco—Harriot paid far less attention to the plant than Monardes, for example—than as a work that demonstrates Europeans' fascination with the Western Hemisphere.

The inclusion of tobacco in such works spread news of the plant across the continent. Though books on botany were crucial in the emergence of scientific observation in the sixteenth century, there was far greater demand for books that contained information about the Western Hemisphere. The market for books that told of the peoples, environment, or commodities of the Americas was seemingly insatiable, at least judging from the number of books that printers produced from the time of Columbus's first journey to the end of the sixteenth century.⁵¹ Though tobacco could be found in such important herbals as John Gerard's late-sixteenth-century masterpiece (which told of the plant's virtues and cited the views of Monardes and Thevet), such works were less abundant than works about travel. Perhaps as few as fifty-four herbals were published in Europe in the sixteenth century, in addition to the seven printed there in the fifteenth century.⁵² By contrast, probably over four thousand books were printed in Europe during the sixteenth century that included material about the Western Hemisphere, and perhaps sixty different books included at least some mention—and at times lengthy description—of tobacco.

This disjunction in print between the relative scarcity of herbals and the abundance of books about the Western Hemisphere meant that most readers presumably learned about tobacco from works like those of Léry, Thevet, or Harriot—books that told about Europeans in the Americas. In all likelihood tobacco crossed the cultural divide not in works such as Monardes's treatise but in texts that informed readers primarily about natives and their practices (or their relations with Europeans). That, at least, was the situation at the end of the sixteenth century.

But the situation soon changed. By 1600, authors and printers sensed growing demand for works that described the Americas in more detail, most notably accounts of European exploratory adventures in the Western Hemisphere. Among these pamphlets and books was a new genre of texts that focused primarily, if not exclusively, on tobacco itself. Nowhere was this early discussion of tobacco more intense than in England, where the competing tales that tobacco told took hold of readers' imaginations and spurred the creation of texts that either promoted or condemned the plant.⁵³

The news in these books about tobacco was not always novel. Authors repeated the kinds of information found in Monardes, among others, stressing the specific ailments that tobacco might cure. The first book devoted to the plant, Giles Everard's De Herba Panacea (published in Antwerp in 1587), essentially repeated the claims of Monardes and others.⁵⁴ But authors offered their own experience too, thereby supplementing what had become standard wisdom about tobacco's worth in cures. Anthony Chute, whose small treatise on the plant—based on the manuscript of an unidentified acquaintance—appeared in print in 1595, thought that smoking tobacco might improve the manners of drunkards by fetching "up that same that makes them so mad in the brains." Through his own use he knew that a short smoke could alleviate fatigue but conversely that people who were very tired should smoke "sixe or seaven pipes full" which would help them sleep so soundly that they could make up for lost rest. He did wonder if the individual who had "first devised this secret of drinking Tabacco" did more harm than good. But in the final analysis he believed the evidence revealed that tobacco was worthwhile. He provided his readers with lessons to be learned from other authors (primarily Monardes) and even examples—such as a woman who was suffering from a seemingly incurable facial wound that healed once physicians applied tobacco to it. He was so convinced of its benefits that he offered guidance as to how the plant could grow best in England.⁵⁵

By the time Europeans got their hands on tobacco, many authors had begun to divorce the plant's qualities from the context of the American rituals in which it had earlier appeared. That divorce was necessary for Europeans to become obsessed with tobacco and to embrace its healing powers. Early seventeenth-century reports of the plant's medicinal benefits extolled the qualities that other Europeans had already identified. William Barclay raved about the curative powers of tobacco, informing his readers that every part of the plant could be used and providing instructions on how it should be taken. He claimed that it was "one of the best & surest remedies in the world against Paralisie, epilepsie or apoplexie, that is, the falling ill, & Vertigo Idiopathica, the passion of dizzines in the head by wind, that ever was found out." In other words, here was a cure for "foure of the most incurable diseases that besiege the braine of man." Even those who abused tobacco "at al occasions without observation of any physicall precept" could not die as a result. Still, such abuse tarnished a plant that if "used physically and with discretion, there were no medicment in the worlde comparable to it."⁵⁶ As Richard Brathwaite put: "Tobacco is the onely soveraigne experimentall cure, not onely for the Neapolitan itch, but generally for all maladies incident to mans bodie."⁵⁷ Though some, such as Bath physician Tobias Venner, realized that smoking could be habit-forming and dangerous, no one disputed its medicinal benefits.⁵⁸ By the 1610s a literate English man or woman could read a practical treatise about how to grow tobacco or listen to poetry extolling its greatness in rhymed couplets, as in Sir John Beaumont's Metamorphosis of Tobacco:

Me let the sound of great Tabaccoes praise
A pitch above those love-sicke Poets raise:
Let me adore with my thrice-happie pen
The sweete and sole delight of mortall men,
The Cornu-copia of all earthly pleasure,
Where bank-rupt Nature hath consum'd her treasure
A worthie plant springing from Floraes hand,
The blessed offspring of an uncouth land. ⁵⁹

Whatever medicinal benefits tobacco might have, there was no doubt that those who smoked it enjoyed the sensation, and that Europeans' enjoyment of the plant, celebrated in visual images and in poetry, became crucial in the development of the Anglo-American colonies on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Later observers, such as the London apothecary Thomas Johnson who offered an updated version of Gerard's herbal, also praised tobacco's miraculous healing powers.⁶⁰

A Battle in the Books

BY THE TIME tobacco's many benefits had become known to Europeans, an alternative interpretation of the plant had begun to emerge in printed pamphlets and books. In this interpretation, tobacco users abused the plant for their own illicit enjoyment. As one early historian of tobacco recognized, the critique in England had three interrelated components: Tobacco should be rejected because it did not live up to the hype of its ardent proponents; tobacco should be avoided because it was dangerous to the human body; and Europeans did not need any commodity that they did not already possess before contact with the Americas.⁶¹

By the dawn of the seventeenth century tobacco's critics had recognized the utility of the printed word in attacking what they believed was a threat to their society. One anonymous English author who used the name "Philaretes" warned readers on the title page that it was "better be chokt with English hemp, then poisoned with Indian Tabacco." Philaretes knew that this slender volume would upset "our smoky gallants" who had for a "long time glutted themselves with the fond fopperies and fashions of our neighbour Countries[.]" Regardless of their views, the dangers of tobacco needed to be proclaimed. In Philaretes's mind, there were eight primary problems, mostly involving the destructive impact of tobacco on the body because of the plant's "venome and poison," as well as its heat and dryness (both of which could be dangerous). But there was a moral element as well—"the first author and finder [of tobacco] was the Divell, and the first practioners of the same were the Divells Priests, and therefore not to be used of us Christians." For proof of this demonic origin, Philaretes cited Monardes, who had become by the early seventeenth the greatest European authority of tobacco. As Monardes had reported, Philaretes wrote, the "Indian Priests (who no doubt were instruments of the divell whom they serve) doo ever before they answere to questions propounded to them by their Princes, drinke of this Tabacco fume, with the vigour and strength wherof, they fall suddenly to the ground, as dead men, remaining so, according to the quantitie of the smoake that they had taken." Once they awoke—once "the hearbe had done this worke"—these Americans gave "answeres according to the visions and illusions which they saw whilst they were wrapt in that order." The all-knowing Devil, the text continued, showed "them the virtue of this hearbe, by meanes whereof they might see the imaginations and Visions that hee represented unto them, and by that meanes dooth deceive them." What should the English do? Philaretes had the answer: "Wherefore in mine opinion this practice is the more to be eschued of us Christians, who follow & professe Christ as the onely veritie and truth, and detest and abhorre the divell, as a lyar and deceiver of mankinde."⁶²

Though Philaretes's work prompted promoters of tobacco to stave off such charges, which they feared might limit the spread of tobacco as a panacea, the herb's opponents soon had their most powerful and famous ally: King James I of England.⁶³ James, who had just claimed the throne after the long reign of Elizabeth I, thought it was "the Kings part (as the proper Phisician of his Politicke-body) to purge it of all those diseases" and vanities such as "our sluggish delicacy" and "prodigality." To do so, he wrote a pamphlet entitled A Counterblaste to Tobacco, published in London in 1604. James was no stranger to the importance of the printed word; during his reign as James VI of Scotland he had promoted certain issues through his writings. When he arrived in London, he was sufficiently alarmed about tobacco to make it the subject of his first printed work—a work that strove in many ways to demonstrate his support for England and its ways (and thus allay the anxieties of some observers who might have perceived him as a dangerous foreign leader installed as the head of their state).⁶⁴

Of all the dangers in his realm, James argued that there could not be "a more base, and yet hurtfull, corruption" than the "abuse" of tobacco, a phrasing that revealed that he too recognized the plant's useful properties. James emphasized that tobacco, which by then "growes almost every where," had originated among the native peoples of the Americas, who had employed it as "a Preservative, or Antidot against the Pockes, a filthy disease, whereunto these barbarous people are (as all men know) very much subject" due to the natives' "uncleanly and adust constitution of their bodies" and the "intemperate heate of their Climat." Given such origins, what could have prompted the English to "move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly maners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking a custome?" What could cause the civilized English to "base our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God? Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill, as they doe?" The use of tobacco was still relatively rare in England, he noted, apparently having begun when two "Savage me[n]" arrived the country soon after the discovery of the Americas. The men had long since died; the customs they introduced remained. James was fascinated with witchcraft, so anything tainted by otherworldly powers must have seemed especially dangerous.⁶⁵

Yet it was not only the unholy origins of tobacco that concerned James. He disagreed with one element of the prevailing medical theory that suggested that because human brains were "naturally colde and wet" it made sense to smoke tobacco since "all dry and hote things should be good for them." Antidotes so contrary to the body's natural order were dangerous, not beneficial, and hence damaged the body. Further, tobacco was not a benign product that happened to be hot; it possessed, as James put it, "a venomous facultie joined with the heate thereof, which makes it have Antipathie against nature, as by the hatefull smell thereof doeth well appeare." It also made no sense to smoke tobacco as a purgative for "Rhewmes and distillations" of the head and stomach since the plant caused or exacerbated those symptoms. The fact that tobacco was popular was no argument that it was good, the king added, since "the corruption of envie" prompted humans to act "like Apes, counterfeiting the maners of others, to our owne destruction." It was even more absurd to listen to any claim that tobacco could be a panacea. "[W]hat greater absurditie can there bee," he asked, "then to say that one cure shall serve for divers, nay, contrarious sortes of diseases?" He pointed out the inconsistencies in the claims made for tobacco: it could make people sleep well, for example, but also awaken someone who was drowsy. Just because Native Americans might have found it of use against the pox did not mean that the English would reap similar benefit because tobacco in England "is refined, and will not deigne to cure here any other then cleanly and gentlemanly diseases."⁶⁶

After laying out what he believed was definitive medical proof against the use of tobacco, the king concluded by outlining the "sinnes and vanities" that consumers committed in their "filthie abuse" of the plant. Those who used tobacco without even the pretence of needing its medicinal benefits suffered from "sinnefull and shamefull lust." Such use was also "a branche of the sinne of drunkennesse, which is the roote of all sinnes." Even worse in his opinion, the continued use of tobacco had dishonored the king and the Commonwealth because "this continuall vile custome brought your selves to this shamefull imbecilitie." Users were so enervated that they were unable "to ride or walke the journey of a Jewes Sabboth"—that is, a short distance—and even needed to borrow coal from neighbors to light their tobacco. Such physical and moral decay had softened the polities of the Persian and Roman empires and explained their collapse. "And this very custome of taking Tobacco," James added, "is even at this day accounted so effeminate among the Indians themselves, as in the market they will offer no price for a slave to be sold, whome they finde to be a great Tobacco taker." James even anticipated later concerns about secondhand smoke, condemning those who polluted the air despite the feelings of others. "Surely Smoke becomes a kitchin far better then a Dining chamber," he added, "and yet it makes a kitchin also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them, with an unctuous and oily kinde of Soote, as hath bene found in some great Tobacco takers, that after their death were opened." Tobacco users' foul breath also offended him, and prompted him to chastise a husband whose breath stank so much that his wife "must also corrupt her sweete breath therewith, or else resolve to live in a perpetuall stinking torment." Smoking was, in the end, beyond salvation: "A custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse."⁶⁷

James's unambiguous assault on tobacco echoed earlier European concerns over the plant's savage history. Yet his denunciation did not stop tobacco use from spreading over the course of the seventeenth century. Its victory was attributable to the combination of market forces (the profits to those who sold it) and physiological effects (addiction). If James's pamphlet can be read as a warning of the imminent decline of his new realm—a warning echoed by religious moralists influenced by the teachings of Puritanism—it also can be seen as a text suggesting the limits of traditional restraints by state and church in a battle to control the movement of profitable commodities.⁶⁸

Still, despite what appears in retrospect as an inevitable tale, the debate over tobacco continued to rage in England during the early decades of the seventeenth century. For every advocate, it seemed, there was a detractor. Tobacco became a fixture in public and private life, entering into the consciousness of the English in rumors and public performances. A maske performed in Whitehall in 1613 included two characters dressed like" Floridians" and another wearing "Tobacco-colour stuffe cut like Tobacco leaves" while holding "an Indian Bow and Arrowes."⁶⁹ One anonymous author claimed that those implicated in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, while in jail awaiting their execution, "seemed to feele no part of feare." Instead, their true nature could be seen in the way they "were richly appareled, fared deliciously, and tooke Tabacco out of measure, with a seeming carelesnesse of their crime[.]"⁷⁰ When Nicholas Breton offered a small book describing individuals who were worthy and who were not, he included a category of the "effeminate foole," who could be identified in part by the fact he would "lie on a bed, and take Tobacco" instead of getting up to do an honest day's work.⁷¹ A minister in Ipswich printed a pamphlet excoriating drunkards, with an image on the title page linking smoking to drinking and playing cards.⁷²

Commentators across the literary spectrum offered observations about tobacco. The physician Edmund Gardiner thought the situation so confused by 1610 that he put tobacco on trial in a small book intended to cut through the absurd nonsense put forth by tobacco's staunchest supporters and its most vociferous detractors. Poring over a number of texts by learned authorities stretching back to antiquity, Gardiner eventually sided with those who recognized the enormous benefits that tobacco produced for various maladies—he even provided some recipes and claimed that some tobacco users in the Americas lived to the age of 160—but he acknowledged that it also could produce unfortunate consequences, such as tobacconists who "foame at the mouth, they startle and quake, rage and ruffle, and wordes escape them, that they afterwards repent."⁷³ The poet Joshua Sylvester found a rhyming scheme to express his sentiments about the "Indian Tyrant" that had become "Englands Shame":

Thousands of Ours here hath he Captive taken,
Of all Degrees, kept under slavish Yoak,
Their God, their Good, King, Country, Friends forsaken
To follow Follie and to feed on Smoake.⁷⁴

By the time Richard Burton published his Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, he was able to summarize tobacco's medicinal benefits at the same time that he condemned its abuse. "Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent Tobacco, which goes far beyond all their Panaceas, potable gold, and Philosophers stones, a soveraigne Remedy to all diseases," he reported. "A good vomit, I confesse, a vertuous herbe if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, & medicinally used, but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as Tinkars do ale, t'is a plague, a mischiefe, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, divilish and damned Tobacco, the ruine & overthrow of Body and Soule."⁷⁵ That same year Thomas Harriot died of cancer of the nose, quite probably from his use of tobacco. The plant, a one-time panacea, had begun to tell its own modern story.

Tobacco in the Market

WHEN TOBACCO learned to speak to Europeans, it provided clues to the nature of the peoples to be found in the Western Hemisphere. Explorers believed that the indigenous peoples of the New World were savages, at least some of whom practiced cannibalism. As Léry, Thevet, and Harriot all knew firsthand—and as many Europeans learned from the pages of illustrated books—the Americans inhabited lands where the devil walked among the heathen and where none of the indigenes possessed protective knowledge of the Europeans' God. Since these people used tobacco to propitiate their deities, the herb itself was one of the instruments of godless, false religions.

But if some believed that tobacco's spiritual connections made the herb suspect, Europeans eager to profit from the natural resources of the Western Hemisphere came to appreciate its apparent value. Since many already were engaged in experiments to improve agricultural yields, it was logical to experiment with a plant that promised some great gain.⁷⁶ Even if the crop had demonic associations, Europeans could still safely exploit its properties if they civilized its uses. They learned to make tobacco theirs by incorporating it into their own cultures and value systems. Tobacco as a panacea fit the sixteenth-century drive to find cures for a range of medical problems, an initiative that had begun in its modern form in Renaissance Italy and spread through the continent via printed books.⁷⁷ The physiological sensations that tobacco produced also possibly fit into various European subcultures, notably those of the poor whose perpetual hunger and search for psychological escape made them vulnerable to or attracted to psychotropic experiences.⁷⁸ And, as King James and other commentators complained, many Europeans found smoking tobacco pleasurable.

Once tobacco became established in Europe, those who celebrated its properties continued to promote its use. Some even reconceptualized Native American production of the plant. In 1622, the year that English settlers and Powhatans went to war near the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in a contest that helped colonists acquire more land for tobacco fields, Johannes Neander's treatise on tobacco appeared in Europe. Though the book offered little news about the plant, it contained three remarkable illustrations depicting Native Americans' techniques for cultivating tobacco. Any European who viewed these images would have noticed that the natives were either naked or scarcely clad, a lingering sign of their lack of civilization. But beyond their nudity, the Americans were not threatening. They might have seemed like children of nature to early modern Europeans but, as the first image revealed, they organized their efforts so that some planted, some harvested, and some hauled the crop (see Fig. 3). Once they harvested the plant, they knew how to process it, using simple but obviously effective techniques that would not have been much more primitive than agricultural technology used in Europe (see Fig. 4). In addition, unlike some earlier images of the Americans—such as Jacques Le Moyne's famous images of Florida's Timucuans working in their fields—these pictures depicted only men involved in the production of tobacco from its planting through its curing. By contrast, the only woman shown in any of Neander's images stands in the shadows of a shed suckling a baby, a picture of domesticity that would have appealed to any European readers who feared that the inverted gender roles of Native Americans might be contagious. Consumption of tobacco might still have some demonic taint, but unlike sixteenth-century engravings, these pictures showed that its production offered no threat to Europeans and their ways.⁷⁹ A last pair of images in the text reinforced the idea that Europeans could make tobacco their own. Native Americans had crafted effigy pipes that were elegant and functional, but the carvings reflected the savage ways of their creators (see Fig. 5). European pipes were more elaborate, demonstrating the mechanical sophistication of those who fashioned them (see Fig. 6). The contrast made evident the ways that Europeans self-consciously thought of themselves as peoples of science rather than savagery, an idea embedded in the title of Neander's book, which identified a particular science of tobacco.⁸⁰

Figure 3. Harvesting Tobacco in the Americas.
From Johann Neander, Tobacologia (1622).

Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 4. Native Americans Processing Tobacco.
From Johann Neander, Tobacologia (1622).

Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 5. American Tobacco Pipes.
Native American tobacco pipes, with carved effigies. From Johann Neander, Tobacologia (1622).

Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 6. European Tobacco Pipes.
Demonstrating the triumph of science over savagery. From Johann Neander, Tobacologia (1622).

Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

While measuring readership is difficult because of the limited records for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Neander's book was apparently popular. It was sufficiently important to be reprinted in 1626 and included in a work on herbs two decades after its first appearance. A French translation was so popular that it was reprinted four times between 1625 and 1630. The text appeared for the first time in an English language translation in 1659, long after learned readers could have studied Neander's text in its original Latin. That edition's frontispiece depicts a sophisticate sitting at his desk in a book-lined study, smoking one pipe while two more lie on his desk near the manuscript he is writing.⁸¹

Once tobacco leapt the cultural divide, its proliferation was astonishing. As early as 1600, tobacco plants grew in Italy, Spain, France, England, Belgium, and Switzerland and far beyond in European outposts in Japan, China, India, Java, and the Philippines.⁸² One recent observer has argued that the plant had the most far-reaching effect in Africa, where indigenous peoples invented tobacco creation myths while adding the plant to the list of smokable substances.⁸³ By the late 1610s, despite the publicity surrounding its alleged abuse by Europeans, the plant was on its way to becoming the economic salvation of Virginia; by the middle of the century, it had become one of the major commodities in the Atlantic basin.⁸⁴ Tobacco also had a unique status in the Atlantic economy: It was the only plant that traveled both ways across the ocean, with European sailors eventually using it in commercial relations with Native Americans even though the plant remained widely produced in the Americas.⁸⁵

Why did tobacco's benefits come to outweigh its problems in the minds of literate Europeans? The answer is complicated. Europeans who traveled westward and expanded the boundaries of their world did so with the belief that they were superior to any native peoples they encountered. They took for granted the idea that primitive peoples lacked civilization and Christianity, and they assumed that these natives would abandon their gods once they discovered true religion. But that cultural critique did not make Europeans blind to the many treasures that could be extracted from the Americas. The Spanish might have melted down golden icons from Aztec temples, as indigenous commentators complained, but they recognized the value of the mineral.⁸⁶ Tobacco was in some sense comparable: It possessed an underlying value that had to be extracted from its savage context. Tobacco's use in heathenish and healing rituals eventually would be replaced by its use in civilized medicine.

During the early seventeenth century there was a dramatic increase in the number of tobacco sellers in Europe. One English observer claimed there were seven thousand people selling tobacco in London alone by 1614. The market for tobacco as a product of leisure as well as a product of medicine grew exponentially. According to one estimate, imports to England rose from 25,000 pounds at the time of the accession of James I to 38 million pounds by the end of the seventeenth century.⁸⁷ Tobacco had become incorporated into a transatlantic market economy, its movements driven forward by tobacconists who saw endless profits from its sale.

Tobacconists capitalized on the spread of knowledge about the plant in printed books. While it is difficult to judge the popularity of any individual title, every printer in Europe must have known that books about the Americas could find an audience. The numbers tell the tale. Perhaps four thousand titles had appeared by 1600; another six thousand came flowing out of presses during the first half of the seventeenth century. Books that included some American content emanated from over fifteen hundred different printers and booksellers, from those clustered in major print centers such as Antwerp, Paris, London, Rome, Venice, and Frankfurt to towns with only one or two print shops.⁸⁸ By the end of the sixteenth century Europeans had already printed approximately sixty books that dealt at least in part with tobacco; by 1650 there were almost 350 additional books that included some mention of tobacco or focused on it exclusively.⁸⁹ Despite protestations from the highest levels of the society (at least in the case of England), the twinned commercial authority of tobacconists and printers provided a steady flow of tobacco into the market and evermore information about it. Negative assessments did not disappear, but any literate smoker with the ability to afford even a relatively small pamphlet could find ample intellectual arguments to counter the most alarming claims.

Books informing readers about a new world and about ways to improve health became ideal vehicles for spreading the news that a panacea had arrived. In a godly society, users could embrace tobacco's virtues without succumbing to its temptations. The English translator of a mid-sixteenth-century agricultural treatise used precisely that logic when he described the use of tobacco in France. While it was true that the "savage Indians" of Florida routinely turned toward their priests for "the successe and events of things to come," and true as well that these leaders used tobacco in their rites, the plant was not to blame. "[W]e must thinke that it is more probable," he wrote, "that such like divination doth proceed of some divelish arte, rather then by any vertue of this plant[.]"⁹⁰ That, at least, was the hope, though tobacco's many critics recognized that the plant's seductive powers were not so easy to tame. Just as an intemperate man might become greedy for gold, so another might hunger for tobacco.

In the end, tobacco proved a more resilient crop than even the most besotted promoter recognized. No one could have anticipated that any new commodity could withstand the assault launched against tobacco, especially when one of those most opposed to the plant was the head of a state. Then again, no European had until that time experienced a commodity that was so addictive. Burton grasped the essence of the situation when he recognized that it was "commonly abused by most men," even those who were not savages. Once the tool of heathens, it became a mechanism by which Europeans descended into a new kind of idolatry of reckless abandon and debauchery. Its medical benefits might have been astounding, but tobacco, protean teller of its own tales, came to define its own future in the generations to come.

Peter C. Mancall is a member of the Department of History at the University of Southern California and the director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. He is currently at work on an environmental history of the Atlantic world in the sixteenth century.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Historical Association in January, 2001. I thank the participants on the panel (Anne Goldgar, Anthony Grafton, and Elizabeth Hyde) as well as Lisa Bitel, Eric Hinderaker, Adam Rome, and the anonymous referees for Environmental History for their comments. I also want to thank the staff of the Huntington Library for their consistently remarkable assistance.

^1. Four major studies of tobacco and its history have been published within the past fifteen years:; V. G. Kiernan, Tobacco: A History (London: Hutchison, 1991); Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Ian Gately, Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World (New York: Grove Press, 2001); and Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For a comprehensive listing of works relating to tobacco, see Eugene Umberger, Jr., Tobacco And Its Use, 2nd ed.(Rochester: Privately printed, 1996).

^2. Rudi Matthee, "Exotic Substances: The Introduction and Global Spread of Tobacco, Coffee, Cocoa, Tea, and Distilled Liquor, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," in Drugs and Narcotics in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24–51; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (1980: reprint, New York: Pantheon, 1992); Jeffrey Knapp, "Elizabethan Tobacco," Representations 21 (1988): 27–66; Jerome E. Brooks, Tobacco: Its History Illustrated by The Books, Manuscripts and Engravings in the Library of George Arents, Jr., 5 vols. (New York: New York Public Library, 1937–1952). A shorter version of Brooks's work can be found in the exhibition catalog produced by the Library of Congress entitled Books, Manuscripts and Drawings Relating to Tobacco from the Collection of George Arents, Jr.(Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1938).

^3. For studies of other plants, see Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Anna Pavord, The Tulip (London: Bloomsbury, 1999); Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949); Larry Zuckerman, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998); Allen Patterson, History of the Rose (London: Collins, 1983); and Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (New York: Knopf, 1992). For an analysis of a cluster of plants (quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, and the potato), see Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

^4. See, for example, Rembert Dodoens, A Niewe Herball, Or Historie of Plantes: wherin is contained the whole discourse and perfect description of all sortes of Herbes and Plantes ... commonly used in Physicke, trans. Henry Lyte (1554, reprint, London, 1578), sig. [xxx v^v]–yyy iv^r; and John Gerard, The Herball Or Generall History of Plantes (London, 1597), sig. [F ffff 4^r–I iiii5^r]. On the relation between plants, cures, and texts see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 141–47.

^5. John Alden, et al., eds., European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776, 6 vols. (New York: Readex, 1980–1988), I: 1–4.

^6. [Edward Johnson], Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Scribner, 1910), 247.

^7. William Cronon, Changes In the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); 159–70; quotation from Johnson on 167.

^8. Europeans' assessments of Native Americans varied widely, from treatises focused on indigenous bodies to abundant commentary about religious practice. Though many European observers tended to be sympathetic toward the indigenous populations of the Americas, the dominant tone of the critiques of Native religion were at best ambivalent. European views about Native Americans have become the object of extensive study in recent years: See, among a very large literature, Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

^9. Goodman, Tobacco in History, 41–42; Marshall Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-pacific Sector of 'the World-system, '" Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988): 1–51; Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). As Goodman noted, the adoption of tobacco by Europeans represented an inversion of the historical processes that Sahlins described, which focused on the adoption of European goods by indigenous peoples in the Pacific. Sahlins explained that European commodities arrived in the Pacific and soon appeared "as signs of divine benefits and displays that [were] also customary sacrifices. Hence the local interests in certain European goods which, by a motivated logic of the concrete, could be assimilated to indigenous ideas of social 'valuables' or sacred kinds." See "Cosmologies of Capitalism," 6.

^10. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 158–59.

^11. Recently Jason Hughes and Jordan Goodman have offered explanations about why Europeans took to tobacco so quickly. Each stressed the importance of notions that tobacco had health benefits, though both also recognized that European cultures shaped the adoption of the plant. Hughes stressed the adoption of tobacco by the British, though he took account of developments on the continent as well. Goodman offered a more sustained discussion. According to his argument, tobacco appealed to early modern Europeans first as a panacea, and news of it spread quickly across the continent (as abundant evidence presented here demonstrates). Yet its acceptance across "all European social classes at about the same time" can be attributed to the fact that it could appeal to physicians looking for cures as well as poorer folk seeking hallucinatory experiences, which sixteenth-century tobacco could have caused. Public discussion of tobacco, Goodman continued, emphasized tobacco's "wondrous curative powers" in quasi-religious terms. Tobacco's success thus can be explained by the fact that it arrived in Europe through various channels, its use was promoted by different sectors of the population, and it was so widespread in the Americas that virtually anyone who came into contact with reports about American flora, early modern medical treatises, or sailors bearing stories could learn of its appeal. Goodman sensibly emphasized that Europeans' adoption of tobacco was not a simple tale of the appearance of a novel commodity but instead needs to be explained as a cultural phenomenon: the integration of a new substance by a broad range of Europeans acting for their own culturally validated reasons. See Hughes, Learning to Smoke, 36–66; and Goodman, Tobacco in History, 37–55.

^12. As Elizabeth Eisenstein has noted, the increasing accuracy of herbals played a crucial role in halting the dissemination of faulty knowledge (promulgated by early printers) and hence helped launch "modern scientific data collection"; see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), I: 262–67.

^13. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 96–97.

^14. Though Nicholas Thomas made his comments in an essay on eighteenth-century European engravings of the Pacific, he specifically mentioned botany (along with architecture) as a field in which the importance of visual evidence was especially important; see Nicholas Thomas, "Objects of Knowledge: Oceanic Artifacts in European Engravings," in In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories, ed. Nicholas Thomas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 94.

^15. As Karen Ordahl Kupperman has noted recently, this desire to learn about American nature extended beyond plants to animals as well, with many seventeenth-century Europeans eager to explain American nature in terms that made sense from Old World models; see Karen Ordahl Kupperman "Natural Curiosity: Curious Nature in Early America," Common-Place 4:2 (January 2004): www.common-place.org.

^16. Henry Lowood, "The New World and the European Catalog of Nature," in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 295–97.

^17. See Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 167–76.

^18. On the functions of tobacco for Native peoples, see Joseph C. Winter, "Traditional Uses of Tobacco by Native Americans," in Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, ed. Joseph C. Winter (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 9–58; Goodman, Tobacco in History, 19–36; A. L. Kroeber, "Culture Element Distributions: XV: Salt, Dogs, Tobacco," University of California Publications in Anthropological Records VI (1941–1942), 1–20; and Johannes Wilbert, Tobacco and Shamanism in South America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). On the widespread use of tobacco in North America, see Alexander von Gernet, "North American Indigenous Nicotania Use and Tobacco Shamanism: The Early Documentary Record, 1520–1660," in Tobacco Use by Native North Americans, 60–64. For Aztecs smoking after dinner, see Sarah A. Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane: Tobacco in Sixteenth-Century Literature (New York: New York Public Library, 1954), 107. For a spectacular collection of photographs of early pipes, see George A. West, "Tobacco, Pipes and Smoking Customs of the American Indians," Bulletin of the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee XVII (1934), part II.

^19. J. M. Cohen, ed. and trans., The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 79.

^20. Martin Waldseemüller, Cosmographie Introductio, trans. Joseph Fischer and Franz von Wieser, (New York: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1907) (orig. pub. 1507), 126–27.

^21. Their comments, and those of virtually every other early commentator, can be found in translation in Brooks, ed., Tobacco, I: 193–211.

^22. Peter Martyr of Angleria, The Decades of the newe worlde or west India, trans. Richard Eden (London, 1555), f. 45^v; Brooks, Tobacco, 195–98.

^23. "[N]o tan solo les era sana: pero muy sancta cosa"; "una costumbre viciosa & mala que la gente de Tracia"; "porque dizen los tales que en aquel tiempo que estan assi trasportados no sienten los dolores de su enfer medad": [Oviedo], La historia general delas Indias [Seville, 1535], f. xlvii^r–xlviij^r, quotations at f. xlvii^r. The entire text is translated in Brooks, ed., Tobacco, 203–04. For a brief review of Oviedo's career, see his Natural History of the West Indies, trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), ix–xvii. Oviedo provided many illustrations in his book, mostly of the indigenous plants that he had seen. But he added pictures of human inventions such as a hammock—where a cacique made delirious by tobacco would lay down (f. xlvii^v)—and a man in a canoe (f. lxi^r).

^24. [Jacques Cartier], A Shorte and briefe narration of the two Navigations and Discoveries to the Northweast partes called Newe France, trans. John Florio (London, 1580), sig. kij^r-v.

^25. Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane, 31.

^26. See Alexander von Gernet, "Nicotian Dreams: The Prehistory and Early History of Tobacco in Eastern North America," in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 67–87, and Francis Robiscek, The Smoking Gods: Tobacco in Maya Art, History, and Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978).

^27.The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Histoire Naturelle des Indes, trans. Ruth S. Kraemer (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996), f. 4, 253.

^28. Ibid., f. 92, 265.

^29. Jean De Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 108–9.

^30. Ibid., 142.

^31. Thevet, The New found worlde, or Antarctike (London, [1568]), 49^f-v or Tevet [sic], Historia Dell'India America detta altramente Francia Antartica (Vinegia, 1561), 133–34; see also Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler, eds., André Thevet's North America: A Sixteenth-Century View (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986), 47–48. Thevet here used "syncope" in its sixteenth-century (and modern) sense, referring to heart failure leading to loss of consciousness or even death.

^32. Léry's major work, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil autrement dite Amerique, first published in Geneva in 1578, appeared in four editions by the end of the century in French, along with two editions in Latin, one edition in German, and an edition in Dutch. After 1600, it remained popular, with editions appearing again in French, Latin, German, Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Czech. For its publishing history, see Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, 257–59. Thevet's Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique, first published in Paris in 1557 and Antwerp in 1558, appeared in multiple Italian versions (Venice, 1561, 1583, 1584) and English (London, 1568) before the end of the century, though his most significant book, the magnificent Cosmographie Universelle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1575) never appeared after its initial publication. For his publishing career, see Schlesinger and Stabler, eds., Thevet's North America, 271–73.

^33. The most exhaustive catalog of illustrations is Brooks, Tobacco; for the sixteenth century, see I: 189–371. On "drinking" smoke, see Petro Pena and Mathia de L obel [Pierre Pena and Matthias de L'Obel], Stirpium Adversaria Nova (London, 1571), 252; the picture has been reproduced in Monique Hulvey, et al., "'Divine Herb' and 'Indian Nectar': Tobacco and Chocolate in the New World and the Old," in New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700, ed. Rachel Doggett et al. (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992), 80.

^34. Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, 88^v (picture), 101.

^35. Theodor de Bry, Americae Tertia Pars (Frankfurt, 1592), 221–29.

^36. It is almost impossible to imagine the effort that early modern Europeans devoted to thinking about demonic forces, including the devil himself; see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially his chapter on the devil, 80–93.

^37. "[P]ara salir de sentido": Oviedo, Historia General de las Indias, f. xlvii^r.

^38. Monardes, Primera Y Segunda Y Tercera Partes de la Historia Medicinal de las Cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que siruen en Medicina (Sevilla, 1574).

^39. Monardes, Joyfull newes out of the newfound world, trans. John Frampton (London, 1580), f. 33–35.

^40. Ibid., f. 35.

^41. Ibid, f. 35–41.

^42. For a synopsis of Monardes's work in the context of other herbals containing material about the Western Hemisphere, see Elinour S. Rhode, The Old English Herbals (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1922), 120–33.

^43. [Richard Eden, ed.], The Decades of the newe worlde or west India (London, 1555), 45^v–46^v.

^44. See Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589; facs. reprint, ed. David B. Quinn and Raleigh A. Skelton, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1965]), I: 188, II: 541.

^45. "The voyage made by Sir Richard Greenvile, for Sir Walter Ralegh, to Virginia, in the yeere 1585," in Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, II: 735.

^46. H. P., Sundrie new and Artificall remedies against Famine ([London?], 1596), sig. C2^V–[c4^v] (liquor and beer), B2^r (tobacco). As Sarah Dickson has pointed out, the text refers to "East Indians" though the author presumably meant the Native peoples of the Americas; see Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane, 98.

^47. Edward Spenser, The Fairie Queene, Book III, canto 5, verse 32; Knapp, "Elizabethan Tobacco," 27.

^48. The text of Thomas Harriot's report had in fact been published in London in 1588, and Richard Hakluyt reprinted the words in the third part of his The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589), 748–64.

^49. Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590; facsimile reprint, New York: Dover, 1972), 16.

^50. Ibid., 16.

^51. For the titles published by 1600, see European Americana, vol. 1; for an analysis of the significance of this literature and how historians have used it, see Peter C. Mancall, "The Age of Discovery," Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 26–53.

^52. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), 284–89. For the number of herbals in circulation, see "A Chronological List of the Principal Herbals and Related Botanical Works Published between 1470 and 1670," in Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution; A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670, ed. Agnes Arber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 227–37. As Arber's list reveals, there were multiple editions of some of these works; as a result, sixteen editions of herbals were published in the fifteenth century and ninety-one editions in the sixteenth century.

^53. Though works on tobacco circulated in various languages across the continent, in the early seventeenth century the English, at least judging from the books printed between 1600 and 1625, were the most deeply engaged in the debate. As with other kinds of books, some texts were translated as soon as they appeared and others much later. James I's Counter-blaste to tobacco, which appeared in English in 1604, could be found in a Latin edition (De abusu tobacco discursus) published in Rostock in 1644, and Anthony Chute's Tabaco, first published in London in 1595, appeared in Rotterdam in 1623 with the title Een korte beschrijvinge van het wonderlijke kruyt tobacco, komende uyt verre ende vreemde landen [A short description of the wonderful powder tobacco, coming out of foreign and strange countries]. As Joyce Chaplin has noted, the debate in England was part of a larger cultural discussion about the nature of Native Americans' bodies; see Chaplin, Subject Matter, 147–49.

^54. See Brooks, Tobacco, I: 301.

^55. A[nthony] C[hute], Tabaco (London, 1595), 10 ("mad in the brains"), 11 (sleep), 12–14 ("secret of drinking"), 30–31 (healing), 34–42 (planting suggestions).

^56. William Barclay, Nepenthes, Or The Vertues of Tabacco (London, 1614), quotations at sig. [A6r], B^r-v.

^57. [Brathwaite], The Smoaking Age, or The man in the mist: with The Life and death of Tobacco (London, 1617), 92.

^58. Tobias Venner, A Briefe and Accurate Treastise, concerning The taking of the fume of Tobacco, which very many, in these dayes, doe too licentiously use (London, 1621). Even Venner laid out ten precepts for tobacco's proper use; see sig. C2^v–[C4^v].

^59. C. T., An Advice How to Plant Tobacco in England and How to bring it to colour and perfection, to whom it may be profitable, and to whom harmfull ... with The Danger of the Spanish Tobacco (London, 1615); John Beaumont, The Metamorphosis of Tabacco (London, 1602), sig. B.

^60. Thomas Johnson, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. Gathered by John Gerarde of London Master in Chirurgie. Very Much Enlarged and Amended (London, 1636), 259–61.

^61. C. M. MacInnes, The Early English Tobacco Trade (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1926), 38.

^62. Philaretes, Work for Chimny-Sweepers: Or, A warning for Tabacconists. Describing the pernicious use of Tabacco, no lesse pleasant then profitable for all sorts to reade (London, 1602), sig Aiii^r ("smoky gallants"), B^v (eight reasons), F4^r-v ("Indian Priests").

^63. See, for example, [Roger Marbeck], A Defence of Tabacco: with a friendly answer to the late printed Booke called Worke for Chimny-Sweepers, &c. (London, 1602).

^64. [James I], Counter-Blaste to Tobacco (London, 1604), sig. A3^v–[A4^v]. For a detailed analysis of the pamphlet by a literary scholar, see Sandra J. Bell, "'Precious Stinke': James I's A Counterblaste to Tobacco," in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 323–43. I am indebted to Jane Rickard for this reference.

^65. [James I], Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, sig. [A4^v], B1^v, B2^r. It is possible that James here referred to two Inuit who came to live in London at the end of the fifteenth century on one of Sebastian Cabot's voyages of discovery; on their existence, see A. H. Thomas et al., eds., The Great Chronicle of London: Guildhall Ms. 3313, (London: G.W. Jones, 1938), 287–88. On James's belief in the reality of demonic forces and hence his desire to eradicate witches because of the threat they posed to society, see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 245, 631, 632. James was not the only person who feared a link between tobacco and otherworldly danger; one of Columbus's crew—purportedly the first European smoker—found himself before the Spanish Inquisition charged with sorcery; see Matthee, "Exotic Substances," 32–33.

^66. [James I], Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, sig. B3^v–[B^r] (tobacco as dangerous), [B4^r-v] (rheumes), C^r ("like Apes"), C2^r–C3^r ("contrarious sortes of diseases," useless against pox).

^67. Ibid., sig. C3^v–[C4^v] (morality), D^r (second-hand smoke), D^v–[D2^r] (breath, "Stigian smoke").

^68. For an excellent analysis of the religious elements of the situation, see David Harley, "The Beginning