safford: narcotic snuff, cohoba 549 



By nearly all authors who have written of ancient Haiti or on 

 the history of tobacco, cohoba snuff has been confused with 

 tobacco, and the bifurcated snuffing tubes have been mistaken 

 for nose pipes used for smoking. This confusion can be traced 

 to Oviedo, whose account of tobacco is misleading and incorrect. 

 Oviedo, indeed, is responsible for many mistakes that have been 

 handed down from writer to writer. His statements are often 

 contradictory, and not infrequently he confesses that he writes 

 from memory or from the testimony of others. In his first work, 

 De la natural hystoria de las Indias (1526), he does not mention 

 either cohoba or tobacco, in connection with the natives of His- 

 paniola. In his Historia general de las Indias (1535) he says 

 nothing of snuff but speaks of the evil custom of taking certain 

 fumigations, which the Indians call tobacco, in order to lose 

 their senses; "and this they did with the smoke of a certain herb, 

 which, according to what I have been able to learn, is of the quality 

 of hen-bane [Hyoscyamus] but not resembling that plant in 

 form and habit;" 3 and he further states that the smoke was in- 

 haled through certain canes with two tubes, of which he presents 

 a Y-shaped figure, which, like his description of the method of 

 using them, was certainly drawn, not from his personal observa- 

 tion, but from the descriptions of others. Oviedo, unfortunately, 

 has been quoted by many authors, and his Y-shaped figure, 

 with its branches so diverging that they could not possibly have 

 been simultaneously inserted in the nostrils of a human being, 

 has been copied again and again. 4 



EARLIEST ACCOUNTS OF COHOBA 



The ceremonial use of cohoba is described in the very first work 

 which treats of the ethnology of the New World, written in 1496 



3 "Usavan los indios desta isla entre otros sus vicios uno muy malo, que es 

 tomar unas ahumadas que ellos llaman tabaco para salir de sentido : y esto hazian 

 con el humo de cierta yerva, que a lo que yo he podido entender es de calidad 

 del velefio: pero no de aquella hechura o forma a la vista." Oviedo, op cit., 

 fol. xlvii. 1535. 



4 Among the earliest writers to cite Oviedo was Purchas, who states that the 

 natives of Hispaniola "had tobacco in religious veneration, not only for sanity, 

 but for sanctity also, as Oviedo writeth ; the smoke whereof they took into the nose 



