The Tobacco Reference Guide by David Moyer

by David Moyer, MD.

Chapter 4 History of tobacco in chronological order

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History of tobacco in chronological order: Before 1500

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Christopher Columbus on his first voyage to the New World brought the tobacco leaf

and seeds out of the Caribbean and in 1492 introduced them to Europe. Its use at first

in Spain and Portugal was quite limited, however, and seeped deeply of pagan

religious mysticism. In fact, tobacco was not received favorably at all by the strongly

devout Christian practitioners of the day who did not adapt well to a product that was

so new and so strange to them. Indeed, from the beginning the use of tobacco was

condemned as wholly evil to any good God-fearing Christian. Rodrigo de Jerez,

among the first of Columbus's sailors to inhale tobacco smoke, apparently became

dependent on tobacco sometime after his initial encounter of it with the Carib Indians;

thereafter he was believed to harbor within him the devil and was imprisoned and

condemned during the Inquisition.

Quote from The Tobacco Epidemic, pp. 15-16 (Gary Huber)

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Columbus and early European settlers noted that a long, thick bundle of twisted

tobacco leaves wrapped in a dried palm or maize leaf was used by Native Americans as a primitive cigar.

Cigars, p. 1

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"Among the Hurons of North American, virtually all men, but few if any women, smoked

N. rustica leaf, and they did so day in and day out. While women were responsible for

growing food crops, men alone had the responsibility for growing tobacco. In one

pre-contact Huron village north of present-day Toronto, archaeologists have found 4,000 clay pipes."

The Tobacco Epidemic, p. 3 (John Slade)

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Within 150 years of Columbus's finding "strange leaves" in the New World, tobacco was being used in every part of the earth.

American Medical News, November 14, 1994, p. 17

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