In South America, many of the tribes are free indulgers in tobacco; and this extends also to the female and juvenile sections of the community. A story, which Signor Calistro narrated to Mr. Wallace whilst travelling in the interior of Brazil, shows that it was nothing but a common occurrence for little girls to smoke. This story is in itself interesting considered apart from all circumstances of veracity. “There was a negro who had a pretty wife, to whom another negro was rather attentive when he had an opportunity. One day the husband went out to hunt, and the other party thought it a good opportunity to pay a visit to the lady. The husband, however, returned rather unexpectedly, and the visitor climbed up on the rafters to be out of sight, among the old boards and baskets that were stowed away there. The husband put his gun by in a corner, and called to his wife to get his supper, and then sat down in his hammock. Casting his eyes up to the rafters, he saw a leg protruding from among the baskets, and thinking it something supernatural, crossed himself, and said, ‘Lord deliver us from the legs appearing overhead!’ The other, hearing this, attempted to draw up his legs out of sight; but, losing his balance, came down suddenly on the floor in front of the astonished husband, who, half-frightened, asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘I have just come from heaven,’ said the other, ‘and have brought you news of your little daughter Maria.’ ‘Oh, wife, wife! come and see a man who has brought us news of our little daughter Maria!’ then, turning to the visitor, continued, ’and what was my little daughter doing when you left?’ ‘Oh, she was sitting at the feet of the Virgin with a golden crown on her head, and smoking a golden pipe a yard long.’ ‘And did she send any message to us?’ ‘Oh, yes; she sent many remembrances, and begged you to send her two pounds of your tobacco from the little rhoosa; they have not got any half so good up there.’ ‘Oh, wife, wife, bring two pounds of our tobacco from the little rhoosa, for our daughter Maria is in heaven, and she says they have not any half so good up there.’ So the tobacco was brought, and the visitor was departing, when he was asked, ‘Are there many white men up there?’ ‘Very few,’ he replied; ‘they are all down below with the diabo.’ ‘I thought so,’ the other replied, apparently quite satisfied; ‘good night.’”
On the Orinoco, tobacco has been cultivated by the native tribes from time immemorial. The Tamanacs and the Maypures of Guiana wrap maize leaves around their cigars as did the Mexicans at the time of the arrival of Cortes; and, as in Chili, is done at the present day. The Spaniards have substituted paper for the maize husks, in imitation of them. The little cigarettos of Chili are called hojitas. They are about two inches and a half long, filled with coarsely powdered tobacco. As their use is apt to stain the fingers of the smoker, the fashionable young gentlemen carry a pair of delicate gold tweezers for holding them. The cigar is so small that it requires not more than three or four minutes to smoke one. They serve to fill up the intervals in a conversation. At tertulias, the gentlemen sometimes retire to a balcony to smoke one or two cigars after a dance.
The poor Indians of the forests of the Orinoco know, as well as did the great nobles of the Court of Montezuma, that the smoke of tobacco is an excellent narcotic; and they use it, not only to procure an afternoon nap, but, also to induce a state of quiescence which they call dreaming with the eyes open. At the Court of Montezuma the pipe was held in one hand, while the nostrils were stopped with the other, in order that the smoke might be more easily swallowed. Bernal Diaz also informs us, that after Montezuma had dined, they presented to him three little canes, highly ornamented, containing liquid amber, mixed with a herb they call tobacco, and when he had sufficiently viewed and heard the singers, he took a little of the smoke of one of these canes, and then laid himself down to sleep. A tribe of Indians originally inhabiting Panama, improved upon this method, which occupied both hands, and involved considerable trouble; the method adopted by the chiefs and great men of this tribe, was to employ servants to blow tobacco smoke in their faces, which was convenient and encouraged their indolence; they indulged in the luxury of tobacco in no other way.
Amongst the Rocky Mountain Indians, it is a universal practice to indulge in smoking, and when they do so they saturate their bodies in smoke. They use but little tobacco, mixing with it a plant which renders the fume less offensive. It is a social luxury, for the enjoyment of which, they form a circle, and only one pipe is used. The principal chief begins by drawing three whiffs, the first of which he sends upward, and then passes the pipe to the person next in dignity, and in like manner the instrument passes round until it comes to the first chief again. He then draws four whiffs, the last of which he blows through his nose, in two columns, in circling ascent, as through a double flued chimney; and their pipes are not of the race stigmatized by Knickerbocker as plebeian. None of the smoke of those villanous short pipes, continually ascending in a cloud about the nose, penetrating into and befogging the cerebellum, drying up all the kindly moisture of the brain, and rendering the people who use them vapourish and testy; or, what is worse, from being goodly, burly, sleek-conditioned men, to become like the Dutch yeomanry who smoked short pipes, a lantern-jawed, smoke-dried, leathern-hided race. The red people, whether of the Rocky mountains or of the Mississippi, belonged to the aristocracy of the long pipes. Let us hope that they have not degenerated, and become followers of the customs of the barbarian ultra-marines.
Turn over the leaves of “Westward Ho!” until you reach the end of the seventh chapter, and then read of Salvation Yeo and his fiery reputation, and his eulogium—“for when all things were made, none was made better than this; to be a lone man’s companion, a bachelor’s friend, a hungry man’s food, a sad man’s cordial, a wakeful man’s sleep, and a chilly man’s fire, sir; while, for stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach, there’s no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven.” The truth of which eulogium Amyas testeth in after years. But, “mark in the meanwhile,” says one of the veracious chroniclers from whom I draw these facts, writing seemingly in the palmy days of good Queen Anne and “not having (as he says) before his eyes the fear of that misocapnic Solomon James I. or of any other lying Stuart,” “that not to South Devon, but to North; not to Sir Walter Raleigh, but to Sir Amyas Leigh; not to the banks of the Dart, but to the banks of Torridge, does Europe owe the dayspring of the latter age, that age of smoke which shall endure and thrive when the age of brass shall have vanished, like those of iron and of gold, for whereas Mr. Lane is said to have brought home that divine weed (as Spenser well names it), from Virginia, in the year 1584, it is hereby indisputable that full four years earlier, by the bridge of Pulford in the Torridge moors (which all true smokers shall hereafter visit as a hallowed spot and point of pilgrimage) first twinkled that fiery beacon and beneficent loadstar of Bidefordian commerce, to spread hereafter from port to port, and peak to peak, like the watch-fires which proclaimed the coming of the Armada and the fall of Troy, even to the shores of the Bosphorus, the peaks of the Caucasus, and the farthest isles of the Malayan sea; while Bideford, metropolis of tobacco, saw her Pool choked up with Virginian traders, and the pavement of her Bridgeland Street groaning beneath the savoury bales of roll Trinidado, leaf, and pudding; and the grave burghers, bolstered and blocked out of their own houses by the scarce less savoury stockfish casks which filled cellar, parlour, and attic, were fain to sit outside the door, a silver pipe in every strong right hand, and each left hand chinking cheerfully the doubloons deep lodged in the auriferous caverns of their trunkhose; while in those fairy rings of fragrant mist, which circled round their contemplative brows, flitted most pleasant visions of Wiltshire farmers jogging into Sherborne fair, their heaviest shillings in their pockets to buy (unless old Aubrey lies) the lotus leaf of Torridge for its weight in silver, and draw from thence, after the example of the Caciques of Dariena, supplies of inspiration much needed then, as now, in those Gothamite regions. And yet did these improve, as Englishmen, upon the method of those heathen savages; for the latter (so Salvation Yeo reported as a truth, and Dampier’s surgeon, Mr. Wafer, after him), when they will deliberate of war or policy, sit round in the hut of the chief; where being placed, enter to them a small boy with a cigarro of the bigness of a rolling pin, and puffs the smoke thereof into the face of each warrior, from the eldest to the youngest; while they, putting their hand funnel-wise round their mouths, draw into the sinuosities of the brain, that more than Delphic vapour of prophecy; which boy presently falls down in a swoon, and being dragged out by the heels and laid by to sober, enter another to puff at the sacred cigarro, till he is dragged out likewise, and so on till the tobacco is finished, and the seed of wisdom has sprouted in every soul into the tree of meditation, bearing the flowers of eloquence, and, in due time, the fruit of valiant action.” And with this quaint fact, narrated in the bombastic style of chronicles, closeth the seventh chapter of the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, under the style and title already mentioned, and after which digression the course of our narrative proceedeth as before.
The inhabitants of Yemen smoke their well-loved dschihschi pipes, with long stems passed through water, that the smoke may come cold to the mouth; and which, when a few inveterate smokers meet together, keep up a boiling and bubbling noise, not unlike a distant corps of drummers in full performance.
In the Austrian dominions, the lovers of the pipe may be found amongst all classes of the community. Köhl writes, that after taking two or three pipes of tobacco with the pasha at New Orsova, he went into the market-place, where he found several merchants who invited him to sit down, and again he was presented with a pipe. From this place he went to a mosque, calling in at a school on his way:——“The little Turkish students were making a most heathenish noise, which contrasted amusingly with the quiet and sedate demeanour of their teacher, who lay stretched upon a bench, where he smoked his pipe, and said nothing.” He afterwards went to look at the fortifications, and here and there saw a sentinel, with his musket in one hand and pipe in the other. “Twenty-five soldiers were seen smoking under a shed, and on the ground lay a number of shells or hollow balls, which they assured us were filled with powder and other combustibles, yet the soldiers smoked among them unconcernedly, and allowed us to do the same.” A gentleman from Constantinople told him that he had seen worse instances of carelessness, in Asia Minor. He had there been one day in the tents of a pasha, where some wet powder was drying and being made into cartridges, and the men engaged in the work were smoking all the while.
In the “Stettin Gazette,” lately appeared a notification that the Prussian clergy had privately been requested by the higher authorities to abstain from smoking in public. We are not accustomed to it, and should certainly think it odd to see clergymen perambulating the streets with short pipes in their mouths.
In all parts of the Sultan’s dominions, the pipe or narghilè has a stem generally flexible, about six feet in length; and at this the owner will suck for hours. You may see a man travelling, mounted aloft on a tall camel, with his body oscillating to and fro like a sailor’s when he rows, but still that man has his two yards of pipe before him. You may see two men caulking a ship’s side as she lies careened near the shore. Up to their waists in water, they act up to the principle of division of labour; for one will smoke as the other plies the hammer, and then the worker takes his turn at the narghilè. Arabs sitting at work, fix their pipes in the sand. In the potteries both hands must be employed—how, then, can the potter smoke? Necessity is the mother of invention. One end of the pipe is suspended by a cord from the ceiling, the other is in the potter’s mouth.
In smoking, Lane informs us, the people of Egypt and other countries of the East draw in their breath freely, so that much of the smoke descends into the lungs; and the terms which they use to express “smoking tobacco,” signify “drinking smoke,” or “drinking tobacco;” for the same word signifies both smoke and tobacco. Few of them spit while smoking; he had seldom seen them do so.