The Introduction of Tobacco to England

By Jordan Baker

Europe Meets Tobacco
Tobacco had been cultivated in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. By the time Columbus stumbled into the New World, cultures from Canada to the Carribean and Mesoamerica grew and used tobacco in various aspects of life. Indeed, on his first voyage to the Carribean Columbus noted how the people used “burning coals in order to make fire with which to burn certain performed herbs that they had with them.” [1]

As the Spanish and Portuguese became the dominant European forces in the early stages of American colonization, their colonists quickly learned to love tobacco. Convinced that it had benefits for their health, Europeans began cultivating tobacco at home and across the Atlantic in their new colonies. As Europeans got hooked, tobacco began appearing in ports in France, Spain, and Portugal in the 1550s.

Image credit HERE

Tobacco Comes to England
England was the late comer to the game. Tobacco didn’t arrive on the island until 1565. And while many have attributed Sir Walter Raleigh and his Roanoke colonies with introducing the brown leaf to England, it's more likely that the infamous pirate/privateer, Sir Francis Drake, was the first to bring tobacco to Elizabeth’s realm. [2]

As Spanish ships made their way from Mexico and the Carribean to the main port at Seville, which, in 1614, Spain proclaimed the tobacco capital of the world, English privateers happily relieved them of their load. [3]

English sailors also participated in an illicit trade centered out of the Carribean. Spanish colonists grew their own personal crops on several different islands in the region and proved more than willing to trade with sailors from other kingdoms. In 1607, the Spanish governor of the island of Cumaná wrote King Philip III himself, warning his monarch about the tobacco trade on nearby Trindad. “English and Dutch ships are never lacking there,” he said; in a time when empires commonly sought monopolies over the trade with their colonies, this must have been unwelcome news. [4]

No matter how tobacco made it to England, it quickly became a hit. One reason is that it was widely considered good for one’s health. One English writer named William Barclay extolled the virtues of tobacco, claiming it to be “one of the best & surest remedies in the world against Paralisie, epilepsie or apoplexie, that is, that falling ill, & Vertigo Idiopathica, the passion of dizzines in the head by wind, that ever was found out.” Which, to Barlcay’s mind, made tobacco the cure for “foure of the most incurable diseases that besiege the braine of man.” [5]

A Counterblaste from King James I
Not everyone fell in love with tobacco, however. Perhaps the most notable nay-sayer was the king of England himself, James I. Denouncing tobacco as a “noxious weed” James penned an anti-tobacco treatise called “A Counterblaste to Tobacco.” [6] Written in 1604, the Counterblaste leveled two basic arguments against the use of tobacco: it originated among Native American cultures and was thus “barbarous”; and it was not, in fact, good for one’s health.

James I & VI - Image credit HERE

James’s first argument was based in the imperial mindset of Europeans at the time. Across the continent, people felt superior to the cultures they had found when they entered the New World. Whether or not James actually thought this way about the Indigenous nations of the Americas, he attempted to use this mindset to his advantage. In the Counterblaste, James asked his kingdom, “shall wee… that have bene so long civil and wealthy in peace, famous and invincible in Warre, fortunate in both, we that have bene ever able to aide any of our neighbors (but never deafed any of their eares with any of our supplications for assistance) shall we, I say, without blushing abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves of the Spaniards, refuse to the world....” [7]

In essence, James wanted his subjects to think of England as the epitome of culture, and the Indigenous nations of the New World as the epitome of uncultured. And thus, anything that came from these Indigenous nations as uncultured and barbarous - including tobacco.

The crux of James’s next series of arguments, though based in what has borne out to be incorrect science, was actually, in essence, true. Unlike many, James saw smoking tobacco as an unhealthy habit. The cutting edge science of the time stated that “because the braines are colde and moist… things that are hote and drie are best for them…” such as breathing in the warm smoke created by burning tobacco. [8] To counter this, James essentially stated that if brains are cold and moist, that’s the way they’re meant to be. The warm smoke of tobacco, then, would have a harmful effect.

James also sought to dispel the notion that “by the taking of Tobacco divers and very many doe finde themselves cured of divers diseases…” For James, if people recovered from an illness after smoking tobacco it was mere coincidence. In fact, he insisted that tobacco was more likely to kill you than to make you better. To prove his point, he compared tobacco to a more well known substance, alcohol. “If a man smokes himself to death with [tobacco] (and many have done) O then some other disease must beare the blame for that fault... And so doe olde drunkards thinke they prolong their dayes, by their swinelike diet, but never remember howe many die drowned in drinke before they be halfe olde.” [9]

In this near 5,000 word essay, James continued to lambast tobacco and its users. And even though he attempted to back up his rhetoric with action by instituting a high tax rate on tobacco, the popularity of the “noxious weed” continued to grow.

Tobacco’s Staying Power
Eventually James I gave up his anti-tobacco stance and embraced the new crop. Tobacco had become too popular, even by 1604, to be done in by words and taxes. Every level of the English social hierarchy enjoyed it for both leisure and medicinal use. Even James’s predecessor, Elizabeth I, had tried smoking a pipe at the behest of her favorite courtier, Sir Walter Raleigh. [10]

Cultivation of tobacco at Jamestown - Image credit HERE

Another huge reason for tobacco’s staying power in England was the sheer economic benefit the crop brought the burgeoning empire. In 1609, Jamestown reaped its first successful tobacco harvest; by 1614 it was sending its first shipment of tobacco to England. Tobacco quickly became a gold mine, earning the crop the nickname ‘brown gold.’ Indeed, the English hoped a tobacco exporting colony would do for them what the mines of Peru and Mexico had done for Spain. By 1638, Virginia was sending 3,000,000 pounds of tobacco a year back home to England. [11]

As the amount of tobacco Virginia produced and exported continued to climb throughout the seventeenth-century, England’s wealth increased and tobacco’s popularity continued to grow, cementing the crop’s place in English society.

Notes/Sources

1. Peter C. Mancall, “Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” Environmental History, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Oct., 2004): 651. Accessed via jstor.org.
2. Mike Davey, “Trade from the 15th to the 17th Centuries,” lib.umn.edu.
3. Ibid
4. Melissa N. Morris, “Spanish and Indigenous Influences on Virginian Tobacco Cultivation,” Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. Thomas Blake Earl and D. Andrew Johnson Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020), 163-164. Accessed via Google Books.
5. Mancall, “Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” 660.
6. “King James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604,” edu.lva.virginia.gov.
7. King James I of England, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, accessed via laits.utexas.edu.
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. “King James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604,” edu.lva.virginia.gov.
11. Ben Johnson, “Introduction to Tobacco in England,” historic-uk.com.

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Jordan Baker received his BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com.

Snuff - the medicinal cure-all and herbal panacea

by Deborah Swift

The Gawith Snuff Factory

I live close to Kendal in the Lake District in the North of England, and it is known as one of the foremost manufacturers of snuff; a brand known as 'Kendal Brown.' The reason snuff became established as an industry in Kendal can be traced back to two epidemics of Plague in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first epidemic in 1598 struck so badly that two thousand five hundred people died - an enormous number for a small town. The distress of the town was made worse by another epidemic in 1623, but this was not nearly so severe, and the reason was supposedly that people had begun to take snuff - then thought of as a remedy against all kinds of infection.

Outside of the factory with its distinctive sign showing a Turk
(tobacco was thought to be oriental) and his clay pipe

Kendal had easy access to the ports of Whitehaven and Lancaster, and so large quantities of tobacco were imported for the growing number of snuff mills in the town. Tobacco was grown in the British colonies of Maryland and Virginia. From Virigina alone, in 1629 one and a half million pounds of leaves were shipped to England from America. By 1700 Kendal was using its network of transport links, developed through the wool trade, to export snuff to London and the rest of the British Isles.

What is snuff?
Snuff is basically a blend of finely ground tobacco. It was discovered in the late 15th Century but its popularity grew in the 18th Century when it was used by everyone from Napoleon to Pope Benedict XIII. To produce snuff carefully selected, high grade tobacco leaves are sourced from all over the world and are aged for over 2 years. The leaves go through at least two fermentation processes before being ground to specific grades, such as Fine, Medium of Coarse. The Fine blend is the most intense, and the coarser less so, and suitable for beginners to snuff-taking. The snuff can also be moist, medium or dry, or flavoured with scents providing varying experiences for the user.


How snuff was made
the early method of making snuff was by hand, from the 'carrottes' or rolls of tobacco leaf - called carrottes from the French because of their resemblance to the shape of carrots. The carotte was gripped tightly at one end and then other end was ground against a 'rape', a rasp or grater.

A snuff box and grater

In aristocratic circles, the snuff grinding equipment was highly elaborate, and including several items strung on silver chains - a miniatire pick, grater, spoon and tiny rake for separating rough from smooth snuff. Some also included a silver-mounted hare's foot for brushing the snuff from the taker's upper lip. I long to include one of those in a novel!

This time-consuming method was soon superceded by water powered snuff mills in which the grinding process was automated. We tend to take this kind of thing for granted, but forget that heavy machinery of cogs and gears, and the heavy stone grindstones would have had to be transported by horse on carts and waggons, and often up and over hills or across bridges.The snuff itself was transported to the shops in barrels, boxes and bladders made of animal skin.

Snuff is one of the few forms of taking tobacco that has not succumbed to the modern world and the majority of English snuff blends are still made the traditional way. Samuel Gawith's 'Kendal Brown' uses heavy oak and stone pestles dating back to the 1700's to grind their snuff, while the rest of the work is done by hand.

The giant oak pestle still in use

Bottled precious and rare oils, such as Sandalwood and Rose Oil are stored in safes and are carefully blended in a secret room.When smoking was banned from the House of Commons in 1693 a silver communal snuff box was introduced with a supply of the famous 'English Rose' snuff, and surprisingly, is still used today.

'Insufflating' - a pinch of snuff

Traditionally you would take snuff from the back of the hand into both nostrils to take an even helping for each nostril. The portion taken would be half the size of a pea. Snuff was to remain in the front part of the nose, but sneezing was allowed. It was considered polite to use a kerchief or 'mouchoir' (French for handkerchief) to sneeze into, but loud sneezing was considered healthy and not rude.

Keeping snuff fresh

By the second half of the 17th century, ornate boxes were being produced to keep the precious powder dry. Snuff boxes or 'tabatières' are widely collected today, because they are often made from silver, engraved, chased, or enameled. Porcelain containers were also common, and sometimes snuff boxes were hand-painted with miniature landscapes or tiny portraits.

Snuff box with portrait of Marie Antoinette

Do read my previous post  on this blog(from 2013) for more on the fascinating art of snuff-taking.

Sources: 

As linked to pictures, also 'Kendal Brown' by J.W. Dunderdale (Helm Press). All pictures not linked are public domain


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Deborah Swift is the author of several novels set in the 17th Century. The Lady's Slipper, about a rare wild orchid of that name, is set in and around Kendal, and features the new Quaker movement, and the aftermath of the English Civil War.

Follow her on Twitter @swiftsory

or on her website at www.deborahswift.com

Snuff, the habit of five centuries

By Deborah Swift

Collection of snuff boxes from 18th -20th century (Hanson's auctioneers)

Christopher Columbus was responsible for bringing snuff, or ground tobacco, back to Europe in 1496 when one of his party noticed the native people of Haiti using it. It quickly became fashionable among the French and Spanish, and the frenchman Nicot (from whom we get the term 'nicotine') imported larger quantities to France during his travels abroad in the mid 16th century. Initially unpopular with the french monarchy, its fortunes were revived when Catherine Di Medici was given snuff by Nicot as a treatment for migraine. The resulting 'cure' popularized snuff amongst the french aristocracy.

Snuff was expensive as it had to be imported and the grinding process was laborious. Originally the tobacco plug was dried in an oven and then ground by hand in a hand mill by your servant to your requirements. This meant it was mostly available only to the rich. A whole culture grew up around the habit in the following centuries with the manufacture of snuff boxes and bottles and elaborate 'mouchoirs' or handkerchiefs. In England, snuff was made even more fashionable in the 17th century when Charles II returned to England from his exile in France and brought with him his snuff habit. 




Many different snuff mills grew up next to watercourses in London, Sheffield and Manchester to supply the habit. Retailers soon set up shops solely dealing in snuff and snuff accoutrements.

Kendal's snuff factory in the 19thC, click picture for history of snuff in Kendal

Morden Hall snuff grinding mill

Tiny, decorative boxes were popular, because prolonged exposure to air causes snuff to dry out and lose its scent. Snuff boxes were so small because they were designed to hold only one day's worth of snuff.

Carved wooden snuff bottle with hare
courtesy of Wikipedia

Snuff was brought over to America when the colonies were formed and was an essential part of early American life. America produced it’s own unique snuff that had a more smoky aroma than it’s European counterparts and a sweeter taste. Snuff is usually scented or flavoured in unique blends, and a typical blend would be floral, mentholated or spicy. Ingredients used to scent the snuff would include things such as cinnamon, nutmeg, sandalwood or camphor. Nowadays you can even get Cola scented or Cherry scented snuff!

In the coffee houses of the 17th century people took tobacco in three forms - as nasal snuff, inhaled into the nose, as chewing tobacco, and by 'drinking' it, i.e. by smoking it through a pipe.

Advertisement from circa 1700

The use of snuff was at its height in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was recommended by doctors as a general cure-all, ironically as a treatment for coughs, colds or headaches.

Another interesting video on the history of snuff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNFIYByVXCE

Professor A. Phillips Griffiths, of http://www.snuffbox.org.uk/ has been a regular snuff user since the 1940's. He  says the habit is catching on with a new generation since the ban on smoking here in the UK.  But if you are writing about a period any time between the 16th and the 20th century, chances are at least one of your characters would be familiar with the stuff.

My new novel, A Divided Inheritance, which will be out in October features a snuff factory, and I think it must have been wonderfully atmospheric with the ground particles of tobacco floating in the atmosphere and the scent of all the ingredients.

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Next week I am one of the few Brits at the Historical Novel Society Conference where I will be talking about my publication journey, blogging, and my other books: The Lady's Slipper and The Gilded Lily. 
If you are there and see me looking lonely, please come over and say hi! Picture should help you find me!

The first true Virginian - The Honourable Sir William Berkeley

by Anna Belfrage

Sometimes (quite often) you stumble over facts that pique your curiosity. This is what happened to me when I was researching the background for my book Like Chaff in the Wind. As most of the book is set in the Colony of Virginia, I read extensively about colonial life in Jamestown, spending many happy hours expanding my knowledge. To write – or read – about Jamestown in the seventeenth century without mentioning Sir William Berkeley is more or less impossible, and so one of my cameo characters was born.

Sir William, quite the dashing man.

William Berkeley is the longest serving Governor in Virginia history – an impressive thirty years of service - a complex character that alternated moments of great insight with others of sheer pigheadedness.

Born into the landed gentry in Somerset, he received a thorough education and graduated from Oxford at the age of twenty with a B.A. Some years later he received a position at court, where he became a member of “the wits”, a group of literary young men who entertained the court. William penned a number of plays, one of which was performed in the presence of Charles I and his wife Henriette Marie. Major honour, no doubt, but I’m not sure his plays have withstood the tooth of time.

The political situation in England and Scotland was unstable, and when Charles I decided to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the Scots, things turned nasty. William was called to serve as a soldier, and spent a number of years in Scotland, participating in the Bishops’ Wars. Not an experience William much liked, (but he must have done something right as his efforts earned him a knighthood) and when an opportunity came up to buy the governorship in Virginia he did just that, arriving in Jamestown in 1642.

I think it was love at first sight. From the moment William set foot in Virginia, it seems to me he pulled up his roots and transplanted them in the fertile soil of the colony. There were probably a number of reasons why William so took to colonial life, but I would bet the main reason is spelled P-O-W-E-R. At a distance of eight weeks from London, William could set about building his fiefdom just as he wanted it, and being an educated man who’d spent a number of years working within the administration of the Royal Court, I am sure he was bursting with ideas as to what to change.

A contemporary map of Virginia - note especially The Virginian Sea

William quickly concluded that Virginia was far too dependent on tobacco and, as an example, he set about diversifying the crops at his own plantation, Green Spring. Not that it made much impression on his fellow planters who preferred to cultivate a cash-crop like tobacco to such fripperies as lemons and oranges, mulberry trees and rape. Repeatedly during his long tenure, William would try to wean the colony away from tobacco – with no success whatsoever, as in this matter the planters and the distant English government were in total agreement; the planters wanted to make money, the Government wanted to tax them on it.

In 1642, William opposed the revival of the Virginia Company of London – this would have made his own position precarious. The following year he showed considerable political flair when he decided to share his powers with the General Assembly (a colonial parliament –  mostly made up of William’s peers), thereby strengthening the concept of local rule within the colony. This was a small, but important step towards future autonomy.

The 1622 Massacre, in which the Powhatan killed more than a third of the colonists Woodcut, M Merian

He also succeeded in pacifying the Powhatan, all the while balancing elegantly between the different political factions in the colony. England was on the brink of Civil War, and Virginia had its fair share of conflicts between parliamentarians and royalists.  William himself never had any doubts as to where his loyalties lay. He was the king’s man through and through, and once the parliamentarian forces had won the war “back home”, William opened the colony to royalist refugees. In 1652 he was forced to resign, but eight years later he was back as governor.

So far, William is quite the paragon of virtues, isn’t he? Foresighted, well-educated, brave and loyal – quite the example! Unfortunately, there were darker sides to William’s character. In religious matters he was a bigot, showing open hostility towards all those not belonging to the Anglican Church. Of course, in William’s case Puritans were not only religious adversaries, but also political foes, and it seems he had problems distinguishing between the issues of faith and politics.

Puritans and Quakers found it best to leave Virginia, many of them moving to Maryland instead. Papists did best in keeping their religious beliefs private, and any priest not belonging to the Anglican Church who was found proselyting in Virginia risked severe punishment.

William was also something of an elitist. He was against public education, as this would only lead to the children of lesser men being educated well above their standing in society. No, in William’s book equality was great – as long as it was restricted to the landed gentry and above.

One of William’s more interesting quirks was his strong opposition to printing presses. They were forbidden in Virginia, and printers did best not to attempt to circumvent the prohibition, as it might result in them being hounded out of the state. Given William’s love of books and literature, this seems rather strange, but to William the presses were dangerous implements that could be used to produce inflammatory pamphlets, and such he most definitely did not want circulated in “his” colony. Still, for a man so focused on progress, his opposition to education and printing is strange.

Like most of us, William was a fascinating, walking contradiction, combining a modern approach to such concepts as governance, trade and agriculture with less attractive biases when it came to religion and class. Not all that surprising as William was a product of his times, living in a society where certain barriers such as class, gender and religious beliefs were difficult – impossible at times – to breach.

William ended his days under a cloud. With advancing age, he became more authoritarian and his brutal reprisals in the wake of Bacon’s rebellion caused the king to replace him. In January of 1677 William left Virginia, bound for London where he aimed to clear his name. In July of the same year he died in his brother’s house in London. I dare say his soul lies restless under his tombstone in Twickenham. William Berkeley may have been born an Englishman, but he died a Virginian, and had he been allowed to choose, that is where he’d have wanted to be buried.

Daffodils in West Virginia (Commons.Wikimedia.org)

Today, William Berkeley's beloved Green Spring is a ruin. In spring, the ground is covered by flowering daffodils, a sea of transplanted yellow flowers (daffodils are not natural to the American flora) that can be seen as a commemoration of the Englishman who became an American. I think William would have been pleased – even if he’d grumble a bit about the land lying unproductive.

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Anna Belfrage is the author of A Rip in the Veil  and Like Chaff in the Wind. The Third book in The Graham Saga, The Prodigal Son, has just been released as an e-book and will be available as a paperback from July 1st, 2013. Set in seventeenth century Scotland and Virginia, the books tell the story of Matthew and Alex, two people who should never have met – not when she was born three hundred years after him.

Drinking Tobacco - A 17th Century Vice - by Deborah Swift

Nobody in my novel THE GILDED LILY 'drinks' tobacco, which is a pity because that is actually the word that was used for smoking in the 17th century. If I had used that word than the reader would have stopped to think why and it would have brought them out of the story to focus on the writer instead of staying in my 17th century world.

So I used the word 'smoke' even though it is technically incorrect. Cigarettes did not exist of course so all smoking was through a pipe, and the smoke was drunk, sipped or swallowed. Smoking was a word only applied to the tobacco itself when it was alight!

Tobacco was very expensive so pipe bowls were very small, allowing less than an ounce of tobacco. The stem of the pipe was very long and the hole through which you drank very small. You would have had to suck quite hard to get your hit of tobacco.

Painting by Pieter Claesz 1636

Clay pipes were very decorative especially those made for women, and I have an example at home which has flowers around the bowl. The pipes were cast from a mould after the original shape was carved from wood or fashioned from clay. The one below from the Museum of London shows a carved sailing ship.

For more examples you can't do better than to visit the website of Heather Coleman, an amateur archaelogist and expert on clay pipes.

This image of a seventeenth century woman with a pipe is from an article about women and smoking by Beth Maxwell Boyle. She has a collection of pipes and smoking related memorabilia on her website

Pipes were also used by children in the age-old fashion even in the 17th century as Michaelina Woutiers' 'Boys Blowing Bubbles' from the 1640s shows us. This painting is in the Seattle Art Museum, and is a wonderful resource for costume detail. Note the shell used for holding the bubble-blowing liquid. Let's hope the boys did not 'drink' the contents!

Are there things in novels you have read that jumped you out of the story? And if you're a writer have you made decisions that were technically incorrect for the benefit of the reader?

And for more about the THE GILDED LILY, a historical adventure set in rich mansions and dark alleys of 17th century London have a look at the trailer.

THE GILDED LILY is already available on Kindle and will be out in paperback and in other e-formats in the US on 27th November. Read the latest review at TheLittle Reader Library