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Chapter 2: The Tobacco Coast
Chapter 2: The Tobacco Coast
LOWLY ORGANIZED CREATURES
The Spanish had brought back Nicotiana tabacum from the Caribbean. ... After arriving in Jamestown [Virginia] in 1610, [John] Rolfe talked a shipmaster into bringing him some N. tabacum seeds from Trinidad and Venezuela. Six years later Rolfe returned to England with his wife, Pocahontas, and his first big shipment of tobacco. ...
Exotic, intoxicating, additive, and disdained by stuffy authorities, smoking had become an aristocratic craze. When Rolfe's shipment arrived, one writer estimated, London already had seven thousand or more tobacco "houses"—café-like places where the city's growing throng of nicotine junkies could buy and drink tobacco. Unfortunately, because the sole source of fine tobacco were the colonies of hated Spain, the weed in England was hard to obtain, costly (the best tobacco sold for its weight in silver), and vaguely unpatriotic. London tobacco houses were thrilled by the sudden appearance of an English alternative: Virginia leaf. They clamored for more. Ships from London tied up to the Jamestown dock and took in barrels of rolled-up tobacco leaves. Typically four feet tall and two and a half feet across at the end, each barrel held half a ton or more. To balance the weight, sailors dumped out ballast, mostly stones, gravel, and soil—that is, for Virginia tobacco they swapped English dirt. ...
[American] Indians had traditionally raised tobacco, but only in small amounts. The [English] colonists, by contrast, covered big areas with the stands of N. tabacum. Neither natives nor newcomers understood the environmental impact of planting it on a massive scale. ...
ENGLISH FLIES
Even at the height of the war [against the Virginian Indians] John Rolfe had been experimenting with N. tabacum. King James I had initially excoriated smoking as "lo[a]thsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, [and] harmefulle to the braine." He thought about banning it but changed his mind—the perpetually cash-short monarch had discovered that tobacco could be taxed. English smokers were relieved, but not happy; the Spaniards kept raising prices. Much as crack cocaine is an inferior, cheaper version of powdered cocaine, Virginia tobacco was of lesser quality than Caribbean tobacco but also not nearly as expensive. Like crack, it was a wild commercial success; within a year of its arrival, Jamestown colonists were paying off debts in London with little bags of the drug. The cease-fire with Powhatan let colonists expand production explosively. By 1620 Jamestown was shipping as much as fifty thousand pounds a year; three years later the figure had almost tripled. Within forty years Chesapeake Bay—the Tobacco Coast, as it later became known—was exporting 25 million pounds a year. Individual farmers were making profits of as much as 1,000 percent on their initial investment.
The Wedding of Pocahontas with John Rolfe, lithograph by Geo Spohni, c. 1867.
One thousand percent! And all that was needed was sun, water, and soil! The sums skyrocketed if farmers could afford servants—laborers' annual pay was about £2, but they could grow £I00 or even £200 of tobacco in that time. ... Newcomers poured in, grabbed some land, and planted N. tabacum. English-style farms spread like rumors up and down the James and York rivers. So many colonists poured in that the company realized they could not be controlled entirely from across the ocean and created an elected council to resolve disputes—the first representative body in colonial North America. ...
Barely three weeks later a Dutch pirate ship landed at Jamestown. In its hold was "20. and odd Negroes"—slaves taken by the pirates from a Portuguese slave ship destined for Mexico. (About thirty more showed up in another ship a few days later.) In their hurry to extract tobacco profits, the [Virginian farmers] had been clamoring for more workers. The Africans had arrived at harvest time. Without a second thought colonists bought the Africans in exchange for the food the pirates needed for the return trip to Europe. Legally speaking, the "20. and odd" Africans may not have been slaves—their status is unclear. Nevertheless, they were not volunteers; their purchase was a landmark in the road to slavery. Within weeks of each other, Jamestown had inaugurated two of the future United States' most long-lasting institutions: representative democracy and chattel slavery. ...
Not that the colonists paid attention to these landmarks—they were too busy exporting Virginia leaf. Obsessed by tobacco, some of the leadership complained, the colonists let Jamestown fall once again into ruin: "the Church down, the Palizado's [walls] broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the store-house they used for the Church; the market-place, and streets and all other spare places planted with Tobacco. " Massive celebratory drunkenness was common; incoming ships brought liquor and profitably transformed themselves into floating temporary taverns. Dale was forced to issue an order to Virginia's planters: grow food crops, too, or forfeit your tobacco to the colonial government. Few paid attention.
Alas, the boom came too late for the Virginia Company. Shipping colonists across the Atlantic only to have them die had exhausted its start-up capital. Company officers persuaded London's powerful clergy that helping Jamestown find more investors was the duty of all English Christians. Sunday after Sunday, ministers urged their parishioners to buy shares in the Virginia Company. "Goe forward," Rev. William Crashaw urged potential "noble and worthy Adventurers," some of whom sat The tactic worked. Ministers enticed more than seven hundred individuals and companies to put at least £25,OOO into the Virginia Company. (By contrast, historians believe that fewer than a dozen men were the original backers of the company and that they put in just several hundred pounds.) The new sum was enough to send over hundreds of colonists, Rolfe and Dale among them, who eagerly grew tobacco. But even the rush of tobacco profits could not offset the debts from the company's years of losses. The Virginia Company was again running out of money...
From today's vantage the story seems more complex. The goal of the Virginia Company had been to integrate Virginia, and thus poor England itself, into the rich new global marketplace. ...the company had done exactly that—with "Smokey Tobaco," the first American species to disperse into Europe, Asia, and Africa. Fun, exciting, and wildly addictive, tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty. N. tabacum was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.
The Virginia Company published a series of promotional tracts to encourage investments and emigration. (London, 1609)
By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, tobacco was enthralling the upper classes in Delhi, where the first smoker, to the dismay of his advisers, was none other than the Mughal emperor; thriving in Nagasaki, despite a ban promulgated by the alarmed daimyo; and addicting sailors in Istanbul to such an extent that they were extorting it from passing European vessels. In that same year a traveler in Sierra Leone observed that tobacco, likely brought by slave traders, could be found "about every man's house, which seemeth half their food." Nicotine addiction became so rampant so quickly in Manchuria, according to the Oxford historian Timothy Brook, that in 1635 the khan Hongtaiji discovered that his soldiers "were selling their weapons to buy tobacco." The khan angrily prohibited smoking. On the opposite side of the world, Europeans were equally hooked; by the 1640s the Vatican was receiving complaints that priests were celebrating Mass with lighted cigars. Pope Urban VIII, as enraged as Hongtaiji, promptly banned smoking in church.
From Bristol to Boston to Beijing, people became part of an international culture of tobacco. Virginia played a small but important part in creating this worldwide phenomenon.
Chapter 5: Lovesick Grass, Foreign
Chapter 5: Lovesick Grass, Foreign
Trade brought more than silver across the Pacific. Tobacco may have led the parade. Somehow Portuguese ships brought the species across oceans and borders to Guangxi. in southern China. where archaeologists hale unearthed locally made tobacco pipes dating back to 1549. Little mote than two decades later, the plant arrived in the southeast, aboard a silver ship from Manila. Not long after that, it filtered into the northeast, probably from Korea.
Nicotiana tabacum was as much an object of fascination in Yuegang as in London and Madrid. "You take file and light one end [of the pipe] and put the other end in your mouth," explained the seventeenth-century Fujianese poet Yao Lü. "The smoke goes down your throat through the pipe. It can make one tipsy." Writing not long after the smoking weed arrived in Fujian, Yao was amazed by its rapid spread across the province. "Now there is more here than in the Philippines," he marveled, "and it is exported and sold to that country."
Then as now, smoking was made to order for the boredom and inertia of army life. Tobacco was embraced by Ming soldiers. who disseminated it as they marched around the empire. In the southwestern province of Yunnan, one physician reported. Chinese soldiers "entered miasma-ridden (malarial) lands and none of them were spared disease except for a single unit, whose members were in perfect health. When asked the reason, the answer that they all smoked." (Mosquitoes dislike smoke, so smoking actually may have provided some protective effect against malaria-carrying insects.) From that point. the account continued, "smoking spread and now in the southwest, whether old or young, they cannot stop smoking from morning until night." As a child in the 1630s, the writer Wang Pu had never heard of tobacco. When he grew to adulthood, he later recalled, "customs suddenly changed, and all the people, even boys not four feet tall, were smoking."
"Tobacco is everywhere," announced what was apparently China's first smoking how-to book. Calling the plant "golden-thread smoke" and '"lovesick grass"—the latter a nod to its penchant for hooking the user—the Qing dynasty's legions of smokers may have been the planet's most enthusiastic nicotine slaves. An ostentatious addiction to tobacco became the hallmark of the fashionable rich. Men boasted of their inability to eat, converse, and even think without a lighted pipe. Women carried special silk tobacco purses with elaborate jeweled fastenings: to protect their delicate essences from the harsh spirit of tobacco, they smoked extra-long pipes, some so big that they had to be lugged around by servants. A new poetic sub-genre among China's wealthy aesthetes: the hymn to tobacco.
Late-waking aristocratic women slept with their heads elevated on special blocks so that attendants could do their hair and makeup they were unconscious—it shortened the time between waking and the first tobacco of the day. "The scene is a little hard to imagine," remarked Timothy Brook, the Canadian historian whose studies of Chinese tobacco I am drawing upon here. Brook found the tale of the sleeping smokers in Chen Cong's Yancao pu (Tobacco Manual), a learned collection of tobacco-related poetry and prose from 1805. An even more recondite compendium. Lu Yao's Yan pu (Smoking Manual) appeared around 1774. Lu, a former provincial governor, laid down the rules for nicotine consumption in aristocratic circles. Like a modern etiquette handbook, the manual provided a set of smoking do's and don'ts:
From today's perspective. the Chinese courtier’s ornate surrender to tobacco seems absurd, but it had many equally odd counterparts abroad. At the same time that Lu Yao was laying out smoking etiquette, wealthy English were taking snuff (finely ground tobacco stems) in public sessions heavy with ritual. Opening their silver or ivory snuffboxes–"a fetish of the eighteenth century," as the anthropologist Berthold Laufer put it—fashionable young blades scooped out measures of fresh—ground snuff with finger-length ladles made of bone. Parties fell quiet as groups of men in embroidered waistcoats simultaneously inserted tiny pucks of ground tobacco into their noses, then whipped out lace to muffle the ensuing volley of sneezes. Mastering the arcana of snuff was, for the addict, worth the bother: snorted tobacco delivered nicotine to the bloodstream faster than cigarette smoke. Few were more enraptured by the ritual than the celebrated London dandy Beau Brummell, who claimed to have a different snuffbox for every day of the year. Brummell instructed his fellow gallants in the subtle alt of using only one hand to open the box, extract a pinch of snuff, and stick it in a nostril. The injection had to be accomplished with a rakish tilt of the head to avoid unsightly brown drips.
Snuff mania had few consequences in England other than interrupted party chatter, high laundry bills, and nasopharyngeal cancer. China's tobacco addiction occurred in an entirely different context, and thus had an entirely different impact. N. tabacum was part of an unplanned ecological invasion that shaped, for better and worse, modern China.
Excerpts taken from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles Mann, Vintage, 2011.
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