St Nicotine of the Peace Pipe

by Edward Vincent Heward

Let fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,

Bright beams of the past, which she cannot destroy.

It is not pleasant to be robbed of a cherished belief. The awakening breaks upon the shores of romance as would a London fog on a Swiss lake; yet it must needs be said that under the critical eye of the expert the vision dissolved, and left but an Elizabethan pipe behind. For such, indeed, was the fate that befell the famous Celtic tumulus and pipe of Bannockstown in Kildare. Stories, fanciful and fairy-like, relating to small pipes found in Irish by-paths, are mentioned in Mr. Crofton Crocker’s Fairy Legends of Ireland. The peasant who picked up one of these always knew that it belonged to the Cluricaunes, ‘a set of disavin’ little devils,’ he would explain, ‘who were always playing their thricks on good Christians;’ and with a few words of choice brogue he would break it and throw the bits away. Ireland, however, does not stand alone in that legendary lore wherein pipes have played their little part in life’s romance. In Worcestershire there still lingers, or did linger until the scream of the locomotive startled the woods out of their sylvan dream, a fairy tale of Queen Mab having held her court at a spot near old Swinford, where a number of smoking-pipes had been found, so small that none other than fairy fingers could have made them for fairy mouths. So there grew up among the country folk gifted with a light fancy, the belief that Queen Mab had presided at her revels in the dell, distributing among her troop the fairy pipes they had found, while sighing on the breeze,

Come away elves, while the dew is sweet,

Come to the dingles where the fairies meet.

Leaving the aerial domain of fairy-land, our thoughts are wafted to Central Asia, still in search of an Eastern birthplace for the weed. In the writings of a Hindoo physician, examined by Doctor Mayer of Konisberg in the course of his Eastern researches, it is stated that tobacco was first brought into India by the Franks in the year 1609, that is to say, nearly a century after its introduction into Europe. The date agrees well with the progress the Portuguese had at that time made in establishing themselves in India. For nearly a century they had been in possession of Goa; they held important seats of commerce in various other parts of India, and had command of the greater part of the oriental trade. These earliest of European explorers in the far East, having about the close of the fifteenth century made a successful passage round the Cape of Good Hope, were not slow to secure for themselves a footing on the western shores of Asia, and onward to the Indian Archipelago. Wherever they settled they introduced the American habit of smoking, and eagerly was it adopted by the different peoples with whom they had dealings. In the annals of Java, tobacco is stated to have been imported into that island, and the habit of smoking it taught to the natives by the Portuguese in 1601. To the Portuguese and the Spaniards, fortified later by the prodigious puffing powers of the Dutch, may be fairly ascribed whatever credit may be due for spreading a knowledge in the Eastern World of the habit which, for weal or for woe, has exercised a more potent witchery over man’s life than probably any other indulgence, largely modifying and usually soothing and sobering his temperament. It seems but reasonable to suppose that if the plant and its use as a narcotic had been known in the East generally, independently of Europe, the indefatigable Jesuits, who penetrated into almost every nook of the Old World likely to afford a see to Rome, would have made the discovery and noted the fact with their usual accuracy. The illustrious traveller and naturalist, Palias, however, takes a different view of the question. ‘Amongst the Chinese,’ he writes, ‘and amongst the Mongolian tribes who had the most intercourse with them, the custom of smoking is so general, so frequent, and has become so necessary a luxury, the form of the pipes, from which the Dutch seem to have taken theirs, so original; and lastly, the preparation of the dried leaves, which are merely rubbed to pieces and then put into the pipe, so peculiar that they could not possibly have derived all this from America by way of Europe, especially as India, where the practice of smoking is not so general, intervenes between Persia and China.’ But surely this reasoning is merely an example of drawing inference from insufficient data; from what at best bears the appearance only of probability.

The learned botanist, Meyen, speaking of China in relation to the habit of smoking, deals with another and more pertinent aspect of the question. ‘It has long been the opinion,’ he remarks, ‘that the use of tobacco, as well as its culture, was peculiar to the people of America; but this is now proved to be incorrect by our present more exact acquaintance with China and India. The consumption of tobacco in the Chinese Empire is of immense extent, and the practice seems to be of great antiquity, for on very old sculptures I have observed the very same tobacco-pipes which are still used. Besides, we know the plant which furnishes the Chinese tobacco; it is even said to grow wild in the East Indies. It is certain that this tobacco plant of eastern Asia is quite different from the American species.’ The tobacco grown in China is very light in colour and almost tasteless, possessing a very small amount of the essential oil, one or two per cent. as against seven or eight per cent. yielded by the Virginian plant. Experiment, however, has brought to light the fact that climate and soil are really answerable for all the difference between the two kinds; that the Nicotiana tabacum of America for example, when transplanted into Syrian soil, has after a few years’ cultivation lost its marked characteristics and become a light-coloured, mild tobacco, like the Shiraz herb. Meyen’s argument would have had more value if he had been able to assign a date to the sculpture on which he had observed representations of tobacco-pipes, or if he himself had seen and examined specimens of the tobacco-plant said to grow wild in the East Indies. As his statement lacks the certainty which authenticated facts alone can give, it leaves the question still unanswered. The two Lazarists, MM. Gabet and Huc, whose zeal and heroic enterprise carried them safely through the wildest districts of Tartary and Thibet, make no mention of the practice of smoking among the inhabitants of those countries; though in China they had noticed outside tobacconists’ shops an effigy of the tobacco plant, which they took to be a representation of the royal insignia of France, for they speak of it as the fleur-de-lis. Doubtless China rose in their estimation when they beheld so flattering an acknowledgment of its indebtedness to the grand nation for the blessing the herb conferred on an unworthy people. But if such were their impression they greatly erred. The inhabitants of the Celestial Empire (Tin-shan) entertained notions of a very different character. Their country (Chung-tow) occupied the centre of the earth, and all beings outside their borders they regarded as Fan-qui, barbarian wanderers, or outlandish demons. The exalted ideas they had formed of themselves led them into the happy delusion that they were the lower empire of the celestial universe. ‘In the heavens,’ says M. Pingré, ‘they beheld a vast republic, an immense empire, composed of kingdoms and provinces; these provinces were the constellations: there was supremely decided all that should happen, whether favourable or unfavourable, to the great terrestrial empire, the empire of China.’ Their historians carry back the traditions of their country to a period so remote (millions of years) that Europe can only be conceived of as primeval forest, and its inhabitants as barely emerging from their protoplasmic swamps. It is, moreover, a country of fantastic oddities, of topsy-turvy notions of the proprieties of every-day life; where you are constantly meeting with gentlemen in petticoats and ladies in trousers, the ladies smoking and the gentlemen fanning themselves: where ladies of quality may be seen toddling like animated walking-sticks, while stout fellows sit indoors trimming dainty head-dresses for them. Go outside the city and you find greybeards playing shuttlecock with their feet or flying curious kites, and others chirruping and chuckling to their pet birds which they have brought out to take the air, while groups of youths gravely look on regarding these juvenile pastimes of their elders with becoming approval.

Early in the course of European adventure in the far East, travellers who, under various disguises had succeeded in penetrating into the interior of China, found in some provinces the cultivation of tobacco ranking among the foremost of their agricultural productions. Bell, in his Travels in Asia (Pinkerton’s Edition, 1811), speaking of China, says: ‘I also saw great plantations of tobacco which they call “Tharr,” and which yield considerable profits. It is universally used in smoking in China by persons of all ranks and both sexes; and besides, great quantities are sent to the Mongols, who prefer the Chinese method of preparing it before any other. They make it into gross powder like sawdust, which they keep in a small bag, and fill their little brass pipes out of it without touching it with their fingers. The smoke is very mild, and has a different smell from ours. It is reported that the Chinese have had the use of it for many ages.’ Tobacco and the habit of smoking it are mentioned in the annals of the Yuen dynasty, about two centuries before Columbus had discovered America. Those who cry down every other than an American origin for the weed, assert that the Chinese product is not tobacco, but some other herb used in the same way. Botanists, however, have shown this opinion to be erroneous. The great plain of Ching-too Foo is noted as the region where the culture and manufacture of tobacco are conducted on a more extensive scale than in any other part of the empire. In this plain the district of Sze-Chuen stands out prominently as the great centre and mart of the industry; from its plantations are exported large quantities of tobacco to other parts of China, to Yun-nan, Hoo-nan, Han-Kow, and also to Se-fan in Thibet. To Han-Kow alone are annually exported about fifty thousand piculs,—say, about three thousand tons. The best is grown in the district of Pe-Heen: the next quality is the product of Kin-lang Heen; and an inferior kind is grown in the plantations of She-fang Heen.

A CHINESE PIPE.