Vermeer's Hat (17 page)

The governor general was only being sensible. Servants from Fujian were of no interest to him, but soldiers were, and soldiers
liked to smoke. They believed smoking helped them ward off the cold and damp. Why damage their morale by taking this prophylactic
away from them? The rumor still persisted that the court had imposed the ban for fear of sedition, but that was because residents
of the capital had reason to feel threatened by the larger forces of rebellion, invasion, and epidemic. Being the newest new
thing, tobacco was somehow implicated in changes with which most felt they could not cope. As indeed it was, though not quite
in the way the people of Beijing thought. To see the bigger picture, we have to look at the globe.

THINK AGAIN OF THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY world as Indra’s net, but one that, like a spiderweb, was growing larger all the time,
sending out new threads at each knot, attaching itself to new points whenever these came into reach, connecting laterally
left and right, each new stringing of a thread repeated over and over again. As the density of strands increased, the web
became ever more extended, more tangled and complex, yet ever more connective. There were many spinners on this web, and many
centers, and the web they made did not extend symmetrically to all places. Some places were favored more than others because
of where they were and what was made there or brought to them. Other places tried to stay off the web by building fortifications
and imposing regulations to isolate themselves. Still, the spider-web grew and ramified wherever people moved, conquered,
or traded—as they were doing during the first half of the seventeenth century at a faster pace and in greater numbers than
ever before.

Along the threads ran all manner of people and goods, boats and carts, warriors and weapons. So too ran a lot of other things:
animals and plants, pathogens and seeds, words and ideas. Movement along the web was not ordered according to anyone’s wishes,
but it was never random, for the only way things like plants or ideas could move was by traveling in the company of those
who moved, and those who moved did so in relation to needs and fears that followed patterns—even if where they ended up wasn’t
where they wanted to go. Many things were swept along in the movements of people who traveled across the globe without anyone
intending that this should happen, remaking the world in ways no one thought possible. American members of the nightshade
family—the tomato, the potato, the hot pepper, tobacco—would all travel globally in just this way.

Native Americans used tobacco to move between the natural and the supernatural worlds and to communicate with the spirits.
Smoking helped to get the spirits’ attention, since the spirits loved the smell of burning tobacco, and it helped to get the
communicant in the right frame of mind. Shamans used it to induce trances enabling them to pass beyond the natural world to
see what the spirits were up to and to peer into the future. Cigarettes today are not particularly hallucinogenic, but Native
tobacco had a nicotine content many times higher than what is now smoked, inducing much stronger psychotropic effects. Champlain
does not say whether the “wizard” who accompanied his war party to Lake Champlain in 1609 smoked himself into intoxication
to prognosticate the outcome of their raid, but he probably did.

The analgesic properties of tobacco were thought to give smoking medicinal as well as religious properties, realms that overlapped
in seventeenth-century pharmacology. In most premodern cultures, sickness signaled a rupture in the proper relationship between
the human and spirit worlds, whether because a spirit was intruding into the human world or because the afflicted person’s
soul had become lost in the spirit world. Just as it was thought to ease a wide variety of complaints from toothache and snakebite
to convulsions and hunger and even asthma, tobacco eased whatever problem arose between the natural and the supernatural worlds
to cause the sickness. The healing property of tobacco was a direct application of its spiritual capacity.

Tobacco moved along the webs of trade that Europe’s desire for China was creating between the Americas and the rest of the
globe, traveling to new sites and coming into the reach of people who had never taken smoke before, Europeans first of all.
With smoking went religious, medical, social, and economic practices that had to find equivalent niches in the new culture.
The Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz half a century ago called this process transculturation: the process by which habits and
things move from one culture to another so thoroughly that they become part of it and in turn change the culture into which
they have moved. Ortiz knew that the “intense, complex, unbroken process” of transculturation can be violently destructive
of what is already there, but the outcomes of these globalizing processes cannot be controlled. One moment of culture can
become another so quickly that it is difficult to remember how things were in the moment immediately preceding this one.

So it was with tobacco. Wherever tobacco showed up, a culture that did not smoke became a culture that did. Transculturation
happened almost overnight, and was usually well advanced before elites bothered to notice that everyone was smoking and started
thinking up reasons why this was not a good thing. Not all of the original meanings of Native smoking made the jump to other
cultures, of course. But many did, including the notion that tobacco opened a door to the spiritual realm. Of course, smoking’s
religious significance had to change with every new environment it entered. In Tibet, it became the stuff that fierce protector
deities consumed to make them even more fierce. The statue of the protector deity of Trandruk Temple in the Yarlung Valley,
for instance, waves a human femur reworked into the shape of a pipe to show just how remorseless he can be when he turns his
attention on the faithless.

So too in Europe, smoking drifted into the world of witchcraft. Tobacco was suspect as a medium for getting in touch with
the devil. In 1609, the year Champlain went on the warpath, Henri IV commissioned an inquisitor to root sorcery out of rural
France. One of the things the inquisitor discovered about witches was that they used tobacco. The inquisitor’s investigations
led him to conclude that every witch had “a plant in their garden, no matter how small, the smoke of which they use to clear
their head, and to sustain themselves somewhat against hunger.” Wasn’t the simpler explanation that poor women kept a tobacco
plant as a balm for hunger and misery? But the inquisitor was looking for witchcraft, not poverty. He was unsure quite what
smoking had to do with the terrible things witches were accused of, “but,” he insisted, “I well do know and it is certain
that it makes their breath and bodies so stinking that no one who was not accustomed to it could stand it, and they use it
three or four times a day.”

The witch panic in Europe faded through the seventeenth century. With it went the idea that tobacco opened channels of communication
with the devil. If suspicious women smoked, it was later reasoned, they did so simply because they liked to, not because they
were intent on engaging in black magic. Once smoking was cleared of its association with witchcraft, even the clergy were
free to take it up, and they did. The Jesuits remained hostile to the habit, and their Society forbade them from smoking,
but they were a minority among the priests. The rest of the Christian clergy took to tobacco with gusto. Indeed, they became
such avid smokers, inside churches as well as out, that the Vatican had to intervene. “Decent people” on their way into church,
the pope noted in 1643, found the smell of smoking offensive and disliked having to step through the tobacco ash that tended
to accumulate around church entrances. Lest their foul personal habits further damage the deteriorating public reputation
of the clergy, the Vatican told priests that they could not smoke in church, nor even in the porches at church doors. Priests
who wanted to smoke could do so, but not in church and well away from entrances.

The sight of other people blowing smoke out of their mouths excited both curiosity and suspicion among those seeing it done
for the first time. What a strange and dangerous thing to do. The poor were already condemned to pass their winters in smoky
hovels inhaling the noxious fumes from cooking fires. Why breathe in smoke when you didn’t have to? Europeans accepted the
idea of breathing incense when they went to church, but only as an environmental inhalant, not as a stream of concentrated
smoke going directly to their lungs. Smoking is not a natural activity. It has to be learned. Reconstructing that process
of learning is what makes the early history of smoking so intriguing.

Every culture learns to smoke in a slightly different way. How people smoke depends on where the practice comes from, who
introduced it, and what local practices or ideas can be adapted to make sense of this strange new habit. A particular challenge
for European elites was getting over the association between tobacco and whoever was already smoking, such as Native Americans.
The most famous early European diatribe against the “vile barbarous custome” of smoking, from the British monarch James I,
struck this theme above all others. Smoking was what “poor wilde barbarous men” did, James pointed out. It belonged to “the
barbarous and beastly maners of the wild, godlesse, and slavish Indians” and was not something an Englishman should imitate.
Natives were “slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God”—three strikes
against any argument in favor of smoking, at least in the king’s eyes. The complaint had little purchase on the minds of his
contemporaries, however. The great Elizabethan historian William Camden could complain all he liked that the English had “degenerated
into the nature of Barbarians, since they are delighted, and think they may be cured, with the same things which the Barbarians
use,” but by 1615 he had to admit that “in a short time many men everywhere, some for wantonness, some for health sake, with
insatiable desire and greediness sucked in the stinking smoak thereof through an earthen pipe.” Unlike Camden or the king,
ordinary people didn’t care who started the practice.

The history of tobacco’s arrival in Europe has mostly been told from the elite side. The account usually starts with the physician
Rembert Dodoens, who in 1553 published a popular Latin herbal in Antwerp (a Dutch edition appeared the following year, and
a German edition the year after). Dodoens’s herbal contains the first botanical entry on tobacco to appear in a medical text.
It is the first written evidence that knowledge of tobacco, possibly even the plant itself, had arrived in the Low Countries.
Dodoens didn’t know what to call the plant, so he borrowed the name of a plant with narcotic properties with which he was
already familiar, henbane. This weed bears purple-streaked yellow flowers similar to those of the tobacco plant, so the name
served provisionally. Shift the story to Portugal three years later, and we find Damião de Goes publishing the claim that
his kinsman Luis was the first person to bring the plant from Brazil to Europe. Damião does not specify a date for this historic
act, but as Luis later joined the Jesuits and went off to India in 1553, the year Dodoens published his herbology, he must
have brought tobacco across the Atlantic before that date. So the distance between knowing about the plant, and experiencing
it firsthand, closes. De Goes says he cultivated the plant in his garden in Lisbon, and if he was growing it, he was probably
smoking it.