Origin and Peregrinations of Tobacco
Tobacco is native to the Americas and was extensively cultivated and smoked by the aborigines there. The addictive weed was first encountered by Christopher Columbus and crew on the island of Cuba in November 1492.
For some years it was known as paetun and by other names before it was given its common name, tobacco, from the pipes in which it was smoked on the island of Santo Domingo.Increasingly cultivated and used by Spaniards and blacks in the West Indies and by Portuguese and blacks in Brazil during the early decades of the sixteenth century, tobacco was introduced to many European countries during the latter decades of that century. In 1559 tobacco seeds obtained in Lisbon by Jean Nicot, the French ambassador, from a Dutch trader just returned from the New World were sent as a medicinal to Queen Catherine de Medici and the House of Lorraine, thereby initiating tobacco cultivation and use in France and gaining lasting fame for Nicot.
Tobacco was brought to England in 1565 by John Hawkins, returning from a second voyage to Florida, but it did not gain immediate popular use. Two decades later, Walter Raleigh established a colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia. When Francis Drake visited the ill-fated colony in June 1586, the governor and others returned with him to England, bringing with them the tobacco and pipe-smoking practices soon popularized by Raleigh and others at Queen Elizabeth’s court. By 1600 tobacco was widely used in all the maritime nations of Europe.
Meanwhile Portuguese traders carried tobacco in the latter 1500s to African ports and to India, the Spice Islands, Japan, Macao, China, and elsewhere in the Orient; and Spanish traders carried it to the Philippines. Other European merchants trading in the Levant took the weed with them throughout the East. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, tobacco was widely available and used in virtually all trading nations of the world.