The gladsome sight that everywhere met their eyes must have been very refreshing to the weary mariners. As far as the eye could reach there was a luxuriant vegetation, and a forest of trees bearing an amplitude of rich and varied fruit stretching down to the shore temptingly over-hanging its sides, as if inviting the strangers to feast and enjoy the good things of this Elysium. Perennial springtime seemed to reign over the happy island, whose inhabitants knew no want nor suffering. Its waters were liquid sapphire and malachite, looking through which could be seen graceful branching corals; sky-blue fishes playing hide-and-seek with golden ones among a delicate network of purple and yellow; there, too, were miniature willows of lilac, and many another rare thing in the mermaids’ pleasure gardens. Here and there the coast was strewn with shells of exquisite beauty—trumpets for Tritons; the king conch, out of whose pink lining lissome fingers create lovely cameos; tiny rice shells, pink ones like ladies’ finger-nails, and cowries, and many another rare shell that, in the days of England’s shell mania, would have realised a handsome fortune for the happy possessor.
Sailing amidst these scenes of wondrous beauty they, sixteen days later, October 28, sighted the island of Cuba, to which Columbus gave the name of Juana, in honour of Prince Juan. In his selected letters, translated by R.H. Major, F.S.A., Columbus says: ‘I followed the coast westward, and found it so large that I thought it must be the mainland, the province of Cathay, China.’ Continuing his narrative he says, ‘And as I found neither towns nor villages on the coast, but only a few hamlets with the natives of which I could not hold conversation because they immediately fled, I kept on the same route, thinking I could not fail to light upon some large cities and towns.… Returning to the harbour I had remarked, I sent two men ashore to ascertain whether there was any king or large cities in that part.’
Cruising in this region of enchantment, Cuba had fallen upon his enraptured gaze like a vision of Eden. Soft and gentle breezes, an azure sunlight sky, a rich luxuriant landscape, the carolling of birds, exercised a powerful influence over his imagination. He exclaims: ‘It is the most beautiful island the eyes ever beheld. I am told that the trees never lose their foliage, and I can well understand it, for I observed they were all as green and luxuriant as in Spain in the month of May. Some were in blossom and others bearing fruit, others otherwise, according to their nature. The nightingale was singing as well as other birds of a thousand different kinds, and that in November, the month in which I myself was roaming amongst them.’
After an absence of three days, the two men whom Columbus had sent to explore returned. They had found no king nor large city, but had come upon many small hamlets with numberless inhabitants; yet nothing could be seen that in any way corresponded to their ideas of settled government. On their way back they for the first time witnessed the use of a herb which, says Washington Irving, ‘the ingenious caprice of man has since converted into an universal luxury in defiance of the opposition of the senses.’ Among other tales, strange and wonderful, the two men told how they had come upon naked Indians with lighted fire-brands in their mouths, from which they drew in the fumes, expelling them again through their nostrils! They were simple, inoffensive people, and well disposed towards the white men, whom they allowed to examine their fire-brands. They had found them to be composed of the dried leaves of a herb rolled up tightly in a leaf of maize. Lighting one end of the roll, they put the other end between their teeth, and inhaled the fragrant vapour with an air of placid enjoyment which seems to have produced in the Spaniards a craving for the weed that to this day has never left them.
Here was a race of beings living in happy ignorance of the strifes and ambitions, the anxieties and vexations of civilised man, reclining in every posture of ease while breathing the fragrant odours of their treasured weed: civilised man, indeed, gazed with amazement and longing. Sweeter far than incense from Arabi was this new delight to the Spaniards, it became a necessity; it was their morning comforter that fortified them for the combat of the day, and their evening solace. Thus it happened that the new world gave to the old its first lesson in the art of regaling tired nature with her own anodyne. Navarrete says: ‘The habit has since become universal, and hence the origin of the so much prized and so far celebrated havanas.’
With the experiences of a new world just dawning upon them, the explorers were prepared at every step to encounter prodigies of a startling character. So far, however, they had seen nothing to cause them apprehension; nothing had yet fallen in their way more interesting than these primitive people clad merely in nature’s copper-coloured cuticle, and adorned with ornaments of pure gold and rare and curious shells intermingled with their braided locks. And yet still more strange, these very simple-minded children of nature looked up to the white men as visitors from the spirit-land of their dreams, and with awe and wonder made offerings to them of whatever things they esteemed most precious. The ships in the offing with flapping wings had come from the blue beyond their ken, and the white men were denizens of the skies. This curious idea—so soon to be dispelled by the rapacity and cruelty of the Spaniards—which the natives had conceived of the strangers is alluded to by many early writers who afterwards visited the new world. Sir Francis Drake, in The World Encompassed (1572-73), speaking of the North American Indians, says: ‘They brought to the ship a little basket made of rushes and filled with a herb which they called tabah.… They came now a second time bringing with them as before had been done, feathers and bags of tabah for presents, or rather, indeed, for sacrifice, upon this persuasion that we were gods.’
The chief object Columbus had in view, that indeed which had secured him the powerful influence of the Church, was not merely the discovery of the marvellous country of the East Indies, mentioned by Marco Polo, but the conversion to Christianity of the Grand Khan who ruled over the land. To this end, and to obtain for him friendly treatment, he bore for the Khan a royal letter of introduction signed by their Christian majesties of Spain.
Meanwhile, Columbus had been busily occupied in collecting the spoils of his easily acquired possessions in the West India Islands, in readiness to return home and render an account to his magnanimous friend and protectress, Queen Isabel, of the perils of his voyage and the ultimate realisation of his dreams. His own vessel, the Santa Maria, having run aground had to be abandoned, but the Niña was soon made ready for him, and without undue delay the little craft weighed anchor on January 16, 1493. On his arrival in Spain the Court was at Barcelona, and thither Columbus journeyed, attended by his train, bearing the trophies of his adventure. He was received by the king and queen with every mark of royal favour. Seated in their presence, he displayed to their eager gaze the specimens he had brought for their acceptance of various products of the new found land: virgin gold, cotton, mysterious plants (assuredly the tobacco plant would be here), birds of rare plumage, and animals of unknown species. But rising in importance above all these things were nine native Indians for conversion and baptism to attest to the reality of his triumph. Though the Grand Khan had not been seen, yet in presence of these Indians even the learned Bishop of Talavera could no longer look askance at the great navigator as a vain dreamer not altogether free from suspicion of magic. In grateful remembrance of Her Majesty’s bounty and enthusiastic protection, Columbus presented to her the casket which had contained the jewels she so generously gave up for his use, now filled with pure gold, as an earnest of what was in store for Spain in their Majesties’ new dominions. The casket is preserved to this day in the sacristy of the cathedral at Grenada.
Columbus was of too active a disposition to indulge his well-earned repose; the old craving for adventure and exploration left him no peace. Under royal command a fleet worthy of his grand scheme of conquest and colonisation was prepared for him, consisting of three large galleons and fourteen caravels, carrying 1,500 men, and all things necessary for the establishment of a new colony. He was invested with supreme authority as admiral, viceroy, and captain-general of all islands and continents in the Western Ocean. Second in authority was Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who accompanied the expedition bearing the royal commission of inspector-general of the West India Islands. By the end of September 1493 the fleet was speeding its way towards the Far West, and with favouring gales was wafted straight amongst the Windward Islands. Had some good genius guided their course across the deep in order to disclose to them the beauties of the new world, no fairer island could have been found than the one which, on that bright morning in January 1494 lay before the adventurers as the great master mariner steered his vessel into the safe harbour of Hayti—land of mountains. The climate was perfect; a perpetual summer was tempered by cool mountain breezes and periodical showers, which swept in from the Atlantic. By the banks of this beautiful harbour, on the north shore, Columbus planted the first Spanish settlement, and in grateful tribute to the Queen he named it Isabella. The country, which in all probability he believed to be the continent he was in search of, he named San Domingo, a name which soon disappears from the records, substituted by that of Hispaniola. From this island came to Europe the first written allusion to the use of tobacco by the natives. It is from Fra Ramono Pane, a Franciscan, whom Columbus had left at Hayti. In a letter to his friend Peter Martyr, Queen Isabel’s secretary, he tells him of a curious practice said to be common among the natives of rubbing the dried leaves of a herb into a powder, and then with a hollow forked tube, two prongs of which they put up their nostrils while holding the lower one in the powder, ‘they drew the powder into their noses, which purges them very much of humours.… The cane or tube is about half a cubit long.’ This description would seem to indicate snuffing rather than smoking. It seems clear that we have here come upon the origin of the practice of titillating the olfactories which towards the close of the sixteenth century, had become, says Molière, ‘la passion des honnetes gens.’ Catherine de Medici became one of the earliest devotees to the new indulgence; fashion led the poudre à la Reine through the courts of Europe, where elegant dilettanti vied with each other in the display of jewelled snuff boxes filled with odeur de Rome, or other right puissant sternutatories, not always of a harmless kind. Prelates and abbés were enamoured of the delightfully-scented refresher, and in Spain they did not scruple to place their brilliant boxes on the altar for their use, in spite of Pontifical ordinances and anathemas from Urban VIII. and Innocent XII. Physicians, carried away with the belief that a grand sternutatory had been discovered, proclaimed its advent to a grateful people, and prescribed its use liberally; for, said they, ‘it must needs do good where the brain is replete with many humours, for senselessness or benumming of the brains, and for a hicket that proceedeth of repletion.’ Yet there were divisions in the ranks of medical men; there were different sides of the question, different interests or tastes to be considered. Had not the Duc d’Harcourt suffered martyrdom in the new cause in order to please Louis le Grand? The Court physician, Monsieur Fagon, devoted his brilliant talents to a public denunciation of the new vice which, springing from heathen soil, was fast spreading over Christendom! Unhappily for the success his eloquence merited, in the warmth of his oratory he so far forgot himself as to dip his fingers into his waistcoat pocket and take copious pinches of tabac en poudre in order to refresh his fickle brain.