Eighth Grade Social Studies
Name: _______________________________________________ Date: _______________ Period: _____
Tobacco: The Early History of a New World Crop
BY LEE PELHAM COTTON / February 1998 / National Park Service
Paragrap
Tobacco use has long been a controversial subject, considered by turns a vice 1, a
panacea2, and a foolish and dangerous habit. However it was perceived, by the end of the
seventeenth century, tobacco had become the economic staple of Virginia, easily making her
the wealthiest of the 13 colonies by the time of the American Revolution.
The Old World encountered tobacco at the dawn of the European Age of Exploration. 3 Paragrap
On the morning of October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus set foot on a small island in the
Bahamas. Believing himself to be off the coast of Asia, the Admiral dressed in his best to meet
the local inhabitants. The Arawaks offered him some dried leaves as a token of friendship.
Those leaves were tobacco. A few days later, a party from Columbus' ship docked off the coast
of Cuba and witnessed local peoples there smoking tobacco through Y-shaped tubes which they
inserted in their noses, inhaling smoke until they lost consciousness.
Paragrap
Early on, the medicinal properties of tobacco were of great interest to Europe. Over a
dozen books published around the middle of the sixteenth century mention tobacco as a cure
for everything from pains in the joints to epilepsy to plague. As one counsel had it, "Anything
that harms a man inwardly from his girdle4 upward might be removed by a moderate use of the
herb."
Eighth Grade Social Studies
In 1560, Jean Nicot, a French ambassador, learned about the curative properties of
tobacco when he was on assignment in Portugal. When he returned to France, he used the New
Paragraph 4
World herb to cure the migraine headaches of Catherine de Medicis. The French became
enthusiastic about tobacco, calling it the herbe a tous les maux, the plant against evil, pains and
other bad things. By 1565, the plant was known as nicotaine, the basis of its genus name today.
By this time, Europeans were discovering recreational5 uses of tobacco as well as its
Paragraph
medicinal ones. As the opening speech of Moliere's Don Juan explains:
. . . there is nothing like tobacco. It's the passion of the virtuous man and whoever lives without
tobacco isn't worthy of living. Not only does it purge the human brain, but it also instructs the
soul in virtue and one learns from it how to be a virtuous man. Haven't you noticed how well
one treats another after taking it. . . tobacco inspires feelings, honor and virtue in all those who
take it.
Paragraph
Although it is likely that both Nicotiana rustica and Nicotiana tabacum, the two major species
of tobacco, were grown as curiosities in the gardens of English botanists and apothecaries,
smoking the herb for recreation was virtually unknown until mid-sixteenth century. The general
English population was most likely first introduced to tobacco by Sir John Hawkins, who
displayed it with the riches he accrued from a voyage to Florida in 1565.
1
A vice is a bad behavior like smoking, gambling, cursing, etc.
2
A panacea is something that cures everything.
3
The European Age of Exploration was the topic of the first two units this year.
4
A girdle is a piece of clothing generally worn around the waist.
5
Recreational means using it for fun or relaxation.
Probably the most famous Englishman associated with the introduction of tobacco is Sir Paragraph
Walter Raleigh. Settlers rescued from his Roanoke Island expedition in 1586 had picked up the
habit of tobacco smoking (or "drinking" as it came to be called). Hariot remarks in his account of
1588 that:
We ourselves during the time we were there used to suck it after their [the Native Americans']
manner, as also since our return, and have found many rare and wonderful experiments of the
virtues thereof, of which the relation would require a volume of itself: the use of it by so many of
late, men and women of great calling as else, and some learned Physicians also, is sufficient
witness.
Paragraph
In addition to sponsoring this expedition, Sir Walter also is credited with the
introduction of pipe smoking in court circles, where it was at first perceived as a strange and
even alarming habit. Tradition tells the tale of Sir Walter's own servant coming upon his master
with a smoking pipe, thinking he was on fire and drenching him with a bucket of water. Another
legend depicts Raleigh introducing the habit of tobacco-drinking to his queen Elizabeth I.
Eighth Grade Social Studies
Smoking quickly became the rage among the young court dandies, 6 who loitered7
around in St. Paul's practicing smoke tricks with such evocative names as the "Gulpe," the
"Retention" and the "Cuban Ebolition."
There were those, however, who were convinced that the use of tobacco was both Paragraph
unhealthful and aesthetically8 distasteful. In 1604, King James I of England published his
pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco, in which he describes smoking as:
“A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the
lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the
pit that is bottomless.”
Part of James' distaste for tobacco may be attributed to his personal dislike of Sir Walter Paragraph 1
Raleigh. Another factor was the Spanish monopoly over the production and distribution of the
plant, which was worth its weight in silver at the end of the sixteenth century. James I solved
the former problem by beheading his enemy; his financial difficulty was at an end a decade
after the publication of his pamphlet. An English source had been found for tobacco.
In 1606, two years after the
publication of Counterblaste, the King
granted a charter to the Virginia Paragraph
Company of London. In addition to
claiming land for England and bringing
the faith of the Church of England to
6
Dandies, as used here, is a derogatory term for the fashionably dressed noble class people that hung around
palaces as members of the king or queen’s entourage (squad).
7
Loitering means to stand around without a purpose.
8
Aesthetically distasteful is a way to say it is ugly.
the native peoples, the Virginia Company was also required both by the crown and its members
to make a tidy profit by whatever means it found expedient.9
Paragraph 12
After the settlers landed on Jamestown Island in the spring of 1607, they quickly began
searching for ways to make a fortune both for themselves and the Company. The gold and
jewels they had hoped to find were nonexistent. Harvesting raw materials like fish, lumber and
furs was difficult work. Industries such as glassblowing, pitch and tar production, silk cultivation
and mining required skilled labor and too much start-up time.
Paragraph
Paragraph
14 13
Within a few years of the founding of Virginia, both the settlers and the Company were
beginning to give up hope of a profit. Fortunately for all concerned, help was on the way. In the
Eighth Grade Social Studies
spring of 1610, the young John Rolfe arrived at Jamestown, a member of the party which had
been delayed by shipwreck on the Bermuda Islands. Rolfe brought tobacco seeds with him
from Trinidad. How Rolfe came by fine Trinidad tobacco seed is not known, but he was growing
it experimentally by 1612 in Virginia. Rolfe's agricultural attempt was an huge success.
Although Sir Thomas Dale, deputy-governor of Virginia, initially limited tobacco Paragraph 1
cultivation in the fear that the settlers would neglect basic survival needs in their eagerness to
finally get rich, 2,300 pounds of tobacco were exported to the Mother Country in 1615-16.
True, this was a tiny amount compared with the over 50,000 pounds imported from Spain in
the same period, but it was a start. In 1616, Rolfe visited England with his new wife Pocohontas
and presented James I with a pamphlet in which the Virginian modestly revealed tobacco the
best crop to grow in Virginia to make a profit.
Paragrap
Little did Rolfe guess how important his tobacco crop would become to the economic
survival of Virginia. Initially, the settlers went overboard, with predictable results. A description
of Jamestown in 1617 paints a bleak picture:
"but five or six houses, the church is run down, the palisade walls are broken, the bridge in
pieces, the well of fresh water spoiled; the storehouse used for the church. . . , [and] the colony
dispersed about, planting tobacco."
Conditions eventually
stabilized, thanks to tight
governmental controls.
Virginia economy flourished.
By 1630, the annual import
of Virginia tobacco in England
was not less than half a
million pounds. By 1640,
London was receiving nearly
a million and a half pounds a
9
Expedient means quick.
year. Virginia tobacco was acknowledged as equal, if not superior, in quality to the Spanish
tobacco.
Tobacco was and is a controversial crop. For Virginians at the beginning of the seventeenth Paragraph 1
century, however, James I's "noxious weed" would ensure economic survival of the colony by
becoming the Golden Weed of Virginia.
