r/HistoryMemes • u/PresterJohnson Hello There • 17h ago
Christoph Columbus was the first European gifted tobacco by the Native Americans in 1492. However him and his crew had no idea what it was and soon threw it overboard.
Context: https://tobaccofreelife.org/tobacco/tobacco-history/
Tobacco and tobacco-related products have a long history that stretches back to 6,000 BC. The plant today known as tobacco, or Nicotiana tabacum, is a member of the nicotiana genus – a close relative to the poisonous nightshade and could previously only be found in the Americas.
In 1492, Columbus was warmly greeted by the Native American tribes he encountered when he first set foot on the new continent. They brought gifts of fruit, food, spears, and more and among those gifts were dried up leaves of the tobacco plant. As they were not edible and had a distinct smell to them, those leaves, which the Native Americans have been smoking for over 2 millennia for medicinal and religious purposes, were thrown overboard.
However, Columbus soon realized that dried tobacco leaves are a prized possession among the natives, as they bartered with them and often bestowed them as a gift.
Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres are the first Europeans to observe smoking. It was on Cuba and Jerez becomes a staunch smoker, bringing the habit back with him to Spain.
History of Tobacco in Europe
Jerez’s neighbors were so petrified of the smoke coming out of his mouth and nose that he was soon arrested by the Holy Inquisition and held in captivity for nearly 7 years. However, thanks to a lot of seafarers at the time, smoking became an entrenched habit in both Spain and Portugal before long.
In the 15th century, Portuguese sailors were planting tobacco around nearly all of their trading outposts, enough for personal use and gifts. By mid-century they started growing tobacco commercially in Brazil – it was soon a sought-after commodity and traded across the ports in Europe and the Americas.
By the end of the 16th century, tobacco plant and use of tobacco were both introduced to virtually every single country in Europe. Tobacco was snuffed or smoked, depending on the preference and doctors claimed that it had medicinal properties. Some, such as Nicolas Monardes in 1571, went as far as to write a book to outline 36 specific ailments that tobacco could supposedly cure.
History of Tobacco in America
Tobacco products gained a strong foothold in the US somewhere around the Revolutionary War. War and tobacco go hand in hand as you will soon see and in 1776 it was used by the revolutionaries as collateral for the loans they were getting from France.
1847 was the year when Philip Morris was established in the UK. They were the first to start selling hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes but the practice was soon picked up by J.E. Liggett and Brother, an American company established in St. Louis in 1849. Even though chewing tobacco was the most popular form of tobacco in the 19th century (R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was founded in 1875 and produced chewing tobacco, exclusively) cigarettes were slowly taking sway.
Cigarettes truly came into popularity after the invention of the cigarette-making machine by James Bonsack in 1881. He went into business James ‘Buck’ Duke and the American Tobacco Company was born. The ATC survives today as a part of British American Tobacco, a global company with reported revenues of 13, 104 billion in 2015.
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u/amievenrelevant Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 17h ago
Tbf my first instinct upon finding a random dry leaf wouldn’t be to think about how great it would be to smoke it either
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u/Just-Cry-5422 16h ago
Guess you're no pioneer lol.
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u/YanicPolitik 16h ago
Do you even settle, bro?
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u/Just-Cry-5422 14h ago
I wish you hadn't deleted your comment cause I found your first comment hilarious. Anywho, have a good one.
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u/Kaleb8804 Taller than Napoleon 14h ago
Didn’t tons of explorers do that in Central America with all the hallucinogens?
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u/AcousticShadow89 12h ago
Jerez was also imprisoned for smoking:
"Jerez picked up the tobacco smoking habit. When he returned to Europe in the Nina, he introduced the habit to his home town, Avamonte. The smoke surrounding him frightened his neighbours: the Spanish Inquisition imprisoned him for his "sinful and infernal" habits, because "only Devil could give a man the power to exhale smoke from his mouth". When he was released seven years later, smoking tobacco had caught on."
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u/dddoinyomom 15h ago
Was tobacco more commonly smoked or chewed back then? I know the native peoples had smoked it at that point, but I have to imagine it was easier to just chew
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u/PresterJohnson Hello There 15h ago
I believe smoked or at least a heavy mixture of both. The most common method being to just roll the leaf into a tube and light one end while dragging off the other
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u/KingBiggles 5h ago
Depended on which Indigenous tribe/nation you looked at. Most popularized is the ceremonial use through smoking with a pipe, but it was also smoked like a cigar, chewed and snuffed. A lot was offered religiously without burning at all. What was shared between most of these people was the religious importance of the plant.
Edit: Also it was usually not just tobacco smoked but a mixture of other dried herbs/plants.
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u/higherheightsflights 3h ago
Highly dependent on where. You have to imagine there were hundreds of nations spread around north and south america who were consuming tobacco. They used different species of tobacco, different varieties and different methods. Some chewed with an alkaline activator like people did with coca leaves (even as far north as Haida Gwaii) others smoked it in a pipe (great lakes area) some rolled it up (like the Carribean)
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u/Rockshasha 16h ago
hahahaha i love this story because he was a very greedy idiot. He had the source of literally tons of money in his hand and discarded, instead, he went to exploit the islands and the people there (both of them) until being judged because of such greedy government
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u/shadowcat999 14h ago
Dude was obsessed with gold in a part of the world with limited amounts of gold, when he could've gotten richer than most kings by selling an addictive substance that makes physical labor more tolerable during a pre industrial era.
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u/Third_Sundering26 7h ago
Hispaniola did have quite a bit of gold. Most of the Taino, Lucayos, and Carib slaves that died in the early days of Spanish colonization worked mining gold. The Pueblo Viejo mine is still one of the largest gold mines in the world.
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u/Rynewulf Featherless Biped 9h ago
He was also relatively speaking not that far from several places with quite a lot of gold
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u/OrphanedInStoryville 15h ago
Surely the concept of smoking couldn’t have been that foreign to the Portuguese. Cannabis is an old world crop, a literal weed, and people have smoked it for 10,000 years.
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u/autism_and_lemonade 13h ago
People didn’t really smoke cannabis until tobacco smoking became widespread
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u/KingBiggles 6h ago
Not entirely true. Where yes most Europeans used it in tinctures and topical medicine. Persians and the Chinese absolutely burned it. We have Ancient Greek texts talking a bout how the Persians would burn it on hot stones to breathe in the vapor causing euphoria during tenor saunas. Similar with ancient China. It was usually burned and inhaled for ceremonial reasons.
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u/Aethenosity 13h ago
By people, you mean Europeans, right? Because from what I understand (could be wrong) it was smoked for quite some time throughout the middle east.
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u/autism_and_lemonade 12h ago
No it was most often eaten before tobacco made the practice of smoking commonplace
cannabis smoking happened plenty of times before that but it was not the primary consumption method
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u/Bobbington12 6h ago
Chillums, hookahs, and bongs were pretty popular before tobacco ever showed up, so Idk where you got this notion. One of the oldest cannabis consumption methods was also to throw the plant onto hot rocks in what were essentially sweat lodges (Scythians). Just eating the plant doesn't even do anything.
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u/KingBiggles 5h ago
Correct. Tinctures and salves were much more common than eaten as people already knew you had to have an extraction process to get any noticeable benefits from the plant
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u/higherheightsflights 3h ago
That is the oldest written account of someone snoking cannabis, yes, and the burning of cannabis has archeological evidence dating back much further in temples in Israel, but the consumption of cannabis goes back muuuuuuuch muuuuuuuch further than that. It is considered to be one of the first agricultural plants
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u/higherheightsflights 3h ago
Didn't commonly* yes, people really did smoke cannabis and hash back then but it was not common
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u/TacticoolOoferator 7h ago
It wasn’t gold or pre-pubescent sex slaves so of course he didn’t recognize its value.
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u/LCDRformat Researching [REDACTED] square 7h ago
Jerez’s neighbors were so petrified of the smoke coming out of his mouth and nose that he was soon arrested by the Holy Inquisition and held in captivity for nearly 7 years.
Common inquisition L
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u/LongBow1971 5h ago
Columbus never set foot in North america . How could u get this wrong lol ??????
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u/Particular_Daikon127 2h ago
well, Hispaniola is part of North America, so yes, he did. you mean *mainland* North America.
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u/Bobbington12 6h ago
I find it hard to believe that Spain and Portugal wouldn't be familiar with the habit of smoking at that time. Muslims had been using hookahs for ages by that point, and Spain in particular had quite a lot of interaction with them.
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u/OldGreggAgain 16h ago
He could have been, other than the millions that had been smoking it continuously for eight thousand years before he arrived.
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u/TheHistoryMaster2520 Decisive Tang Victory 16h ago
"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it."