Third Time's The Charm: The Discovery Of Tobacco By Europeans
Anyone who knows the history of cigars knows that Columbus, so influential elsewhere, had his role to play here as well. The journey in which Columbus, for European purposes, "discovered" the American continent is also the one in which Europeans discovered the joys of smoking.
The basic story is well known, now that Bartolomeo de Las Casas's redaction of Columbus's journal has been published and made available to scholars. On October 28, 1492, two of the sailors on Columbus's recently-successful voyage went inland to modern-day Cuba. Rodrigo de Xerez and Luis de Torres were making a survey of the territory that Europeans had never seen before. Natives of the area were seen drawing smoke from certain burning leaves through a tube that was also made from leaves. (The smoked leaves were actually called cohiba; tobacco is an Englished-up version of the word they gave to the tube in which the cohiba was smoked. Our culture's multi-billion-dollar tobacco industry is misnamed.)
What not everybody knows is that Columbus, eager for moneymaking opportunities though he may have been - his earliest journal entries after the discovery of the so-called "New World" already reveal him plotting to conquer and enslave the natives - didn't come close to recognizing the potential value of what he had. Several days before the fateful inland journey of Xerez and de Torres, Columbus had already been presented with tobacco as a gift! On October 12, 1492, setting foot on what would be South America for the first time, Columbus and his crew were met and offered gifts by the Arawak Indians of the region. Among several blandishments given by the hospitable Arawaks, Columbus mentions some strong-smelling "dried leaves" in his diary entry for that day. (It comes just before the part about conquering and enslaving them.) The crew ate the fruit, but not knowing what to do with the dry leaves, they threw them away!
The dried leaves turn up again in Columbus's story. On October 15 he notes that a passing man in a canoe is carrying with him some of those same dried leaves the Arawaks had brought to Columbus and his voyagers. Recognizing it from the first time, he deduces that it must be valuable among the natives, "for a quantity of it was brought to me at San Salvador." (You can just hear those commercial gears turning in his head.)
It takes until October 28 for Xerex and de Torres to actually do their inland voyage and "discover" tobacco for European purposes - but the third time's the charm. At this point, the sailors still think they may be on the other side of the world - they go looking for the Khan of Cathay (China). Here they see the smoke-"drinking" ritual that they take back with them to Spain.
The story has a tragicomic side to it - aside from the tragedies, thefts and atrocities that ended up resulting from colonialism. Xerez becomes so addicted to the habit that the Spanish Inquisition, finding something devilish and supernatural in the leaves' odd smell and the plumes of smoke blowing from Xerez's lips and nostrils, lock him up for seven years. By the time his sentence is up, cigar smoking has conquered Spain.
With Xerez in jail, it was up to another sailing companion of Columbus's to make the pro-smoking pitch to Europeans. That role ended up being filled by a monk, Ramon Pane, who traveled along with Columbus on his second trip to the so-called New World in 1493. On returning to Europe, Pane describes both smoking and snuff-taking, first in conversation and then in a 1497 treatise, De Insularium Ribitus.
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