"We can thus trace to South America, at the period when the New World was first discovered, every mode of using the tobacco plant which the Old World has indulged in ever since."
This statement is not entirely correct—the mode of using tobacco in Norway by plugging the nostrils with small pieces of tobacco seems to have been unknown among the Indians of America as it is now with all other nationalities, excepting the Norwegians.
When Cortez made conquest of Mexico in 1519 smoking seemed to be a common as well as an ancient custom among the natives. Benzoni in his History of the New World[7] describing his travels in America gives a detailed account of the plant and their method of curing and using it. In both North and South America the use of tobacco seemed to be universal among all the tribes and beyond all question the custom of using the herb had its origin among them. The traditions of the Indians all confirm its ancient source; they considered the plant as a gift from the Great Spirit for their comfort and enjoyment and one which the Great Spirit also indulged in, consequently with them smoking partook of the character of a moral if not a religious act. The use of tobacco in sufficient quantities to produce intoxication seemed to be a favorite remedy for most diseases among them and was administered by their doctors or medicine-men in large quantities. Benzoni gives an engraving of their mode of inhaling the smoke and says of its use:—
"In La Espanola, when their doctors wanted to cure a sick man, they went to the place where they were to administer the smoke, and when he was thoroughly intoxicated by it, the cure was mostly effected. On returning to his senses he told a thousand stories of his having been at the council of the gods, and other high visions."
It can hardly be supposed that while the custom of using tobacco among the Indians in both North and South America was very general and the mode of use the same, that the plant grown was of the same quality in one part as in another. While the rude culture of the natives would hardly tend to an improvement in quality; the climate being varied would no doubt have much to do with the size and quality of the plant. This would seem the more probable for as soon as its cultivation began in Virginia by the English colonists it had successful rivals in the tobacco of the West Indies and South America. Robertson says:—
"Virginia tobacco was greatly inferior to that raised by the Spaniards in the West Indies and which sold for six times as much as Virginia tobacco."[8]
But not only has the name tobacco and the implements employed in its use caused much discussion but also the origin of the plant.
Some writers affirm that it came from Asia and that it was first grown in China having been used by the Chinese long before the narcotic properties of opium were known. Tatham in his work on Tobacco says of its origin in substantial agreement with La Bott:—
"It is generally understood that the tobacco plant of Virginia is a native production of the country; but whether it was found in a state of natural growth there, or a plant cultivated by the Indian natives, is a point of which we are not informed, nor which ever can be farther elucidated than by the corroboration of historical facts and conjectures. I have been thirty years ago, and the greatest part of my time during that period, intimately acquainted with the interior parts of America; and have been much in the unsettled parts of the country, among those kinds of soil which are favorable to the cultivation of tobacco; but I do not recollect one single instance where I have met with tobacco growing wild in the woods, although I have often found a few spontaneous plants about the arable and trodden grounds of deserted habitations. This circumstance, as well as that of its being now, and having been, cultivated by the natives at the period of European discoveries, inclines towards a supposition that this plant is not a native of North America, but may possibly have found its way thither with the earliest migrations from some distant land. This might, indeed, have easily been the case from South America, by way of the Isthmus of Panama; and the foundation of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations (who we have reasons to consider as descendants from the Tloseolians, and to have migrated to the eastward of the river Mississippi, about the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico by Cortez), seems to have afforded one fair opportunity for its dissemination."
The first knowledge which the English discoverers had of the plant was in 1565 when they found it growing in Florida, one hundred and seventy-three years after it was first discovered by Columbus on the island of Cuba. Sir John Hawkins says of its use in Florida:—