The History of Tobacco

Experts believe the tobacco plant, (nicotiana), began growing in the Americas at about 6000BC. There is no evidence of  tobacco use in the Ancient world, on any continent save the Americas.

Experts believe American inhabitants began finding ways to use tobacco, including smoking and chewing, a few thousand years later. Use seems to have been centred on the Mayan civilisation. Mayan pottery over a thousand years old has been found, depicting the smoking of a roll of tobacco, tied with string.

As the Mayans migrated, they passed on the habit of tobacco smoking to the Aztecs. The Aztecs of high positions smoked tobacco, mixed with other resins, in primitive pipes, while the ordinary citizens rolled tobacco leaves together into a cigar shape.

The Mayas who settled in the Mississippi Valley spread their custom to the neighbouring North American Indians. The latter adapted tobacco smoking to their religious rituals.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the America’s was offered gifts from the native Americans they encountered. These gifts included tobacco leaves. However, as  none of the sailors had seen tobacco before, the leaves were discarded.

On one occasion, the group found themselves on the island of Cuba, where they saw natives smoking the same type of leaf that they had been offered previously. The tobacco was rolled and lit at one end and the smoke sucked in at the other. One of the expedition, Rodrigo de Jerez tried and quickly became addicted to smoking rolled tobacco.

He is not only credited with being the first European to smoke tobacco, but brought tobacco, and the habit of smoking back to Spain.  However the sight of smoke emitting from a roll of strange leaves so frightened his fellow villagers that he was interrogated by the Inquisition and jailed for a number of years. However, by the time he was released, the habit had taken hold and tobacco smoking had become common place throughout Spain, and beyond.

One of the reasons for the spread of the use of tobacco was the belief, encouraged by doctors and physicians, that tobacco had curative properties. It was thought to heal as many as 36 different health problems, including bad breath and cancer!

The use of tobacco for social smoking developed on several fronts.  In a newly industrialised North America, cigarettes were massed produced. Pipe smoking became very popular and cigars were perfected, particularly in Cuba, where the smoking of rolled tobacco had been first witnessed.

One other form of tobacco smoking had also become popular and that is the smoking of tobacco in roll your own cigarettes, but this has a history of its own.