Authors: Timothy Brook
The history of tobacco’s transculturation into Europe looks a bit different when told from the vantage point of ordinary people.
If Dodoens included it in his herbal, that could only be because someone showed it to him—someone who had either brought it
from the Americas or got it from someone who did. And since Antwerp in the 1550s was northern Europe’s busiest port (Amsterdam
would outclass it only in the next century), receiving as many as five hundred ships a day, that someone almost certainly
stepped with it onto the Antwerp docks. The chain of knowledge ends in Dodoens’s herbology, but it must have begun among those
who actually smoked the plant: sailors. A sailor would not have called it “queen’s weed” or “henbane.” He would have used
the common Native American term “petum”—which is still with us in the name of a relative of the tobacco plant, the petunia.
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But why give Antwerp precedence when the first ships to cross the Atlantic were returning to Portuguese and Spanish ports?
One source suggests that tobacco reached Portugal this way as early as 1548, two decades before Damião de Goes was writing
about it, again probably in the pockets of sailors. So sailors, soldiers, and priests were the Europeans who started smoking
first. Only later did aristocrats and other gentlemen adopt the taste and make it their own.
The Spanish herbologist Juan de Cárdenas interested himself in the medicinal properties of tobacco, and includes the plant
in his study of native medical practices published in Mexico in 1591. Cárdenas acknowledges that he has categorized it pharmacologically
on the basis of how Spanish soldiers in Mexico were using it: to stave off cold, hunger, and thirst—just as the governor general’s
soldiers on the northern Chinese border were doing in 1642. Europeans in the Americas acquired the idea that this is what
tobacco did from Natives, who told them, as they told Jacques Cartier in the 1530s, that smoking kept them “healthy and warm.”
So tobacco was more than just a barbarous practice. It was good for you. An English commentator explains in 1593 that it was
tobacco’s medicinal properties that recommended it most strongly, especially to the damp and rheumatic English. Tobacco, he
notes, was “gretlie taken-up and used in England, against Rewmes [colds] and some other diseases ingendered in the longes
[lungs] and inward partes, and not without effect.” It was not only smoked, but made into a topical cream to rub into the
skin. Offering greater precision, the English herbologist John Gerard in his herbal of 1597 notes that the herb “prevaileth
against all apostemes [abscesses], tumours, inveterate ulcers, botches and such like, being made into an unguent or salve.”
As of 1597, every English apothecary was prescribing the substance.
The demand for tobacco medicine proved to be a moneymaker for apothecaries. As John Gerard happily admits, he used tobacco
to treat “all cuts and hurts in the head, wherewith I have gotten both crownes and credit.” The profits elsewhere in the tobacco
trade were even greater. When Virginian tobacco was still a novelty in England at the turn of the century, it was said that
smokers would pay for its weight in silver. And when smokers pay huge sums to buy something, states like to collect huge duties
when that something crosses the border. King James may have railed against smoking as a barbarian custom, but when the Virginia
Company, which was importing tobacco from the English colony of that name, invited him to raise the import duty on tobacco
to a level he found acceptable, he did. It seems, in fact, that his objection to tobacco was as much about revenue lost to
smugglers as it was about its bad effect on his people.
High prices and high duties of course encouraged both smugglers and farmers to get in on the business—as we noted for Beijing.
Dutch farmers started growing tobacco as an import substitute about 1610, quickly making the Netherlands the biggest tobacco
producer in Europe. Farmers in England did the same, though neither could match the quality of Virginian tobacco. As homegrown
tobacco was much cheaper than the imported product and free of duty, the commercial solution was adulteration: mix local and
imported and tell your customer he was getting the pure stuff. Dutch traders used this technique in the 1630s to undercut
the English tobacco trade in the Baltic. Another method was to stew imported Virginian tobacco and then soak local tobacco
in this liquid to improve its quality, though the results were not great. Still, pleasure and profit were able to work out
a variety of arrangements—from smuggling to false advertising—that kept Europeans in tobacco during those early years.
The profitable solution in the long run was to control both supply and quality at the source. This the Europeans accomplished
by pushing aside Native producers in the Americas and setting up tobacco plantations. Tobacco would henceforth be grown by
English planters, and the profits on the trade would remain within English hands. The demand for tobacco was strong enough
by the 1610s to make colonization no longer just a speculative venture but an affordable one. As beaver pelts funded French
exploration farther north, so tobacco gave the English the means to transplant themselves to Virginia and dispossess Natives
of their land.
Something else had to happen for tobacco to become a commercial crop. Tobacco farmers found that they needed more labor than
their own families could supply. Although the Jesuits had some success getting Indians in South America to work on tobacco
plantations, most were unwilling to work on them. Even if forced, they simply slipped away at night. The solution was to find
people who had no choice but to do the work—slaves. The Dutch, ever with an eye to profitable business ventures, took the
lead. Starting in the 1630s, another state-mandated corporation, the Westindische Compagnie, or West Indian Company—the WIC
as distinct from the VOC—secured strong positions on both sides of the south Atlantic, buying slaves in Africa and selling
them to tobacco plantation owners in the Caribbean and Brazil. The WIC lost most of these colonies in the 1640s as other traders
got into the business, yet during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the WIC was running three to four slave ships
a year to the Caribbean, exclusive of its ships serving South America.
From this new labor arrangement, a new system of trade emerged. Tobacco (along with sugar) was a crop that could be used to
make the Americas profitable, while Africa supplied the labor to make plantation production in the Americas feasible and South
American silver paid for goods shipped from Europe and the Americas to Asia. Together the three prime commodities of the age—silver,
tobacco, and slaves to mine the first and harvest the second—set the foundation on which the long-term colonization of the
Americas rested. This sort of transnational arrangement, which gradually incorporated other commodities as well, became the
pattern that enabled Europe to dominate much of the globe for the next three centuries.
The global span of tobacco was not lost on contemporaries. In his satire on pretentious young men of fashion published in
1609, the English playwright Thomas Dekker addressed tobacco with this plea: “Make me thine adopted heire, that inheriting
the vertues of thy whiffles, I may distribute them amongst all nations.” The tobacco-loving English were content to see everyone
smoke, so long as tobacco agreed to “make the phantastick Englishman (above the rest) more cunning in the distinction of thy
Rowle Trinidado, Leafe and Pudding, than the whitest toothed Blackamoore in all Asia.”
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Let the world become a fellowship of smokers, but let the English rise to the status of being its cleverest connoisseurs and
the unique beneficiaries of its inspirational qualities.
DEKKER WAS NOT WRONG IN supposing that tobacco would soon spread “amongst all nations,” especially in Asia. He prophesied
a little too early to know that China would become the foremost smoking nation, and the Chinese people even more enthusiastic
to become tobacco’s “adopted heire” than the English. It took little time for what appeared to the English to be a moderate
virtue among themselves to appear, when it arrived among the Chinese, like an immoderate vice. An Englishwoman who visited
China in the nineteenth century felt entirely justified to criticize the Chinese passion for smoking by declaring the Chinese
to be “as fond of smoking as the Turks.” This was not a compliment. She thought it was alright to smoke, just not to smoke
to Turkish or Chinese excess.
Tobacco traveled to China by three routes: an eastward Portuguese route from Brazil to Macao, a westward Spanish route from
Mexico to Manila, and a third route that consisted of a series of hops around East Asia to Beijing. The first and second routes
developed about the same time, with tobacco converging on Macao and Manila, and from these trading ports proceeding into China:
from Macao into Guang-dong Province, and from Manila into Fujian Province farther up the coast. Certainly the habit was well
entrenched by the first quarter of the seventeenth century, for when Adriano de las Cortes, the chronicler of the 1625 wreck
of the
Guía
, came ashore near where these provinces meet, he discovered that the Chinese smoked. Las Cortes made the discovery at the
end of his first day as a hostage. He was parched and made signs that he needed something to drink. His guards guessed correctly
and gave him a bowl of hot water, which Chinese regard as more salubrious than cold water. Las Cortes was unused to drinking
hot water and continued to mime, hoping for cold water. “They thought that I was actually asking for something else,” he
reports, “so they brought me some tobacco to smoke.” Las Cortes wanted water, not tobacco, and in any case, being a Jesuit,
was not permitted to smoke. He tried again to make himself understood and eventually, after much hilarity on the Chinese side,
the charade was solved. They brought him a cup, not of cold water nor of hot, but of what he describes as “some hot water
cooked with a herb called
cha
.” This was Las Cortes’s first encounter with tea. Tea had yet to transculturate its way into European society but by 1625,
tobacco had become thoroughly entrenched along the China coast.
Between Guangdong and Fujian Provinces, it was Fujian that gained the reputation as the home of tobacco in China. It arrived
on Chinese ships coming from Manila into several ports, the most important of which was Moon Harbor, serving the prefectural
city of Zhangzhou at the south end of the Fujian coast. Fang Yizhi, a brilliant seventeenth-century scholar much intrigued
by knowledge of the outside world, dates its arrival in Fujian to the 1610s—some three decades before he slipped into Fujian
disguised as a drug peddler to evade the Manchu armies overrunning south China in 1645. Fang identifies the Ma family of Zhangzhou
as the biggest tobacco processors. They clearly made a success of the new product which spread like wildfire. “It gradually
spread within all our borders, so that everyone now carries a long pipe and swallows the smoke after lighting it with fire.
Some have become drunken addicts.”
The word Fang uses for tobacco is
danrouguo
, “the fleshy fruit of the
danbagu
plant.”
Danbagu
was the name the Chinese in the Philippines used for tobacco. They coined it as a rough transliteration of the Spanish
tabaco
, which the Spanish had in turn transliterated from the Caribbean word for the hollow reed in which Caribbean Natives packed
shredded tobacco leaves in order to smoke them.
Danbagu
was foreign sounding and awkward, so Chinese adapted their own word for “smoke” (
yan
) and came up with the expression
chi yan
, “eating smoke.” One Chinese author, looking back from the end of the seventeenth century, suspected it was the Japanese
who coined the term
yan
(pronounced
en
in Japanese) for smoking. This is plausible, Japan being one of the stepping stones on tobacco’s third route into China. As
en
in Japanese is a loan word originally taken from Chinese, though, it is almost impossible to sort out how this word cycled
between the two cultures—both of which continue to use it.
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Chinese intellectuals puzzled over the question of where tobacco originally came from. Some assumed it was native to the Philippines,
since that is whence it arrived in Fujian. Others suspected that the people in the Philippines “got their seeds from the Great
Western Ocean,” a loose term for the distant region from which Europeans came. The thousands of Fujianese who traded with
the Spanish in Manila knew the latter crossed the Pacific Ocean from a place called Yameilijia (America), and may have learned
that this is where the seeds came from. But these were not the people who kept diaries or published essays. When it came to
knowing about tobacco, the gap between the intelligentsia and ordinary people was as wide in seventeenth-century China as
in Europe.
From Fujian, the habit of smoking worked its way into the interior and up the maritime coast. The plant reached Shanghai in
the 1630s, according to Ye Mengzhu, a sharp-eyed memoirist writing at the end of the century. “Tobacco comes originally from
Fujian,” Ye begins, without bothering to guess where it came from before that. “When I was young, I heard my grandfathers
say there was tobacco in Fujian, and that if you smoked it, it would make you drunk, so it was called ‘dry wine.’ There was
none in this area.” He then explains that sometime in the late 1630s, a man surnamed Peng planted some in Shanghai. “I don’t
know where he got the seeds from, but he planted them here, picked the leaves, dried them in the shade, and got workmen to
cut them into threads. He then gave it to traveling merchants to sell elsewhere. Local people didn’t dare taste it.” The 1639
ban on cultivation in Beijing was enforced in Shanghai as well. Ye reports that the ban “stated that only bandits consume
it to ward off the cold and damp, so people were not allowed to grow it and merchants were not allowed to sell it. Anyone
breaking this law would be punished by analogy with the law against doing business with foreigners.” This prohibition had
its effect in Shanghai. Peng was the first to be denounced and everyone else was scared away from cultivating the plant, though
not for long. Soldiers were all smoking tobacco within a few years, Ye reports, and in no time peddlers were selling it again
throughout the realm. It became profitable for growers, and yet it did not supplant cotton as Shanghai’s main commercial crop.
“Very little is grown around here,” Ye observes at the end of his note.