The Sacred Leaf That Caught On

For three centuries tobacco was medicine to Europeans. Doctors prescribed the herb for ailments from halitosis to corns. It all started in 1492 when Columbus and his crew, the first Europeans to see tobacco, found West Indies islanders smoking crude cigars in tribal ceremonies.

Long before Columbus, nearly all the early peoples of the Americas held tobacco sacred. Originally, smoking was a right and function of witch doctors and priests. They used its narcotic effect to induce visions during solemn tribal rites. “Tobacco was intimately associated with their gods,” reports historian W. F. Axton, “not only in their religious observances but also in their curative or healing procedures, all of which were connected in one way or another with their religion.” But if tobacco’s medicinal use is what first caught the eye of Spanish and Portuguese explorers, its use for pleasure soon followed.

“I’ll have another cigarette/​And curse Sir Walter Raleigh,” sang Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Sir Walter, called the “best-known propagandist among Englishmen for the recreative pipe,” grew tobacco on his estate in Ireland. He did his best to popularize the habit among fashionable society. Ahead of his time, he brings to mind the tobacco industrialist and advertising man of the ‘cigarette century.’

But it was the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, not Sir Walter’s charm, that made the 17th century the “Great Age of the Pipe,” says Jerome E. Brooks. “Chiefly through the agency of war,” he maintains, “smoking spread across the Continent” and into Asia and Africa. A similar development was to kick off the era of the cigarette.