"The Floridians, when they travel, have a kind of herb dried, which with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with fire and the dried herbs put together, do suke through the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live four or five dayes without meat or drinke, and this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose: yet do they holde opinion withall, that it causeth water and steame to void from their stomacks."
This preparation might not have been tobacco as the Indians smoke a kind of bark which they scrape from the killiconick, an aromatic shrub, in form resembling the willow; they use also a preparation made with this and sumach leaves, or sometimes with the latter mixed with tobacco. Lionel Wafer in his travels upon the Isthmus of Darien in 1699 saw the plant growing and cultivated by the natives. He says:—
"These Indians have tobacco amongst them. It grows as the tobacco in Virginia, but is not so strong, perhaps for want of transplanting and manuring, which the Indians do not well understand, for they only raise it from the seed in their plantations. When it is dried and cured they strip it from the stalks, and laying two or three leaves upon one another, they roll up all together sideways into a long roll, yet leaving a little hollow. Round this they roll other leaves one after another, in the same manner, but close and hard, till the roll be as big as one's wrist, and two or three feet in length. Their way of smoking when they are in company is thus: a boy lights one end of a roll and burns it to a coal, wetting the part next it to keep it from wasting too fast. The end so lighted he puts into his mouth, and blows the smoke through the whole length of the roll into the face of every one of the company or council, though there be two or three hundred of them. Then they, sitting in their usual posture upon forms, make with their hands held together a kind of funnel round their mouths and noses. Into this they receive the smoke as it is blown upon them, snuffing it up greedily and strongly as long as ever they are able to hold their breath, and seeming to bless themselves, as it were, with the refreshment it gives them."
In the year 1534 James Cartier a Frenchman was commissioned to explore the coast of North America, with a view to find a place for a colony. He observed that the natives of Canada used the leaves of an herb which they preserved in pouches made of skins and smoked in stone pipes. It being offensive to the French, they took none of it with them on their return. But writing more particularly concerning the plant he says:—
"In Hochelaga, up the river in Canada there groweth a certain kind of herb whereof in Summer they make a great provision for all the year, making great account of it, and only men use of it, and first they cause it to be dried in the Sune, then wear it about their necks wrapped in a little beast's skine made like a bagge, with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe, then when they please they make powder of it, and then put it in one of the ends of the said Cornet or pipe, and laying a cole of fire upon it, at the other end and suck so long, that they fill their bodides full of smoke, till that it commeth out of their mouth and nostrils, even as out of the Tonnel of a chimney. They say that this doth keepe them warme and in health, they never goe without some of this about them."
Be Bry in his History of Brazil 1590 gives an engraving of a native smoking a pipe and a female offering him a handful of tobacco leaves. The pipe has a modern look and is altogether unlike those found by the English in use among the Indians in Virginia.
Old Engraving.
An English writer says of the Tobacco using races:—