38 ORIGIN OF THE PLANT. 



Virginia is a native production of the country ; but whether 

 it was found in a state of natural growth there, or a plant 

 cultivated by the Indian natives, is a point of which we are 

 not informed, nor which ever can be farther elucidated than 

 by the corroboration of historical facts and conjectures. I 

 have been thirty years ago, and the greatest part of my time 

 daring that period, intimately acquainted with the interior 

 parts of America ; and have been much in the unsettled parts 

 of the country, among those kinds of soil which are favora- 

 ble to the cultivation of tobacco ; but I do not recollect one 

 single instance where I have met with tobacco growing wild 

 in the woods, although I have often found a few spontaneous 

 plants about the arable and trodden -grounds of deserted 

 habitations. This circumstance, as well as that of its being 

 now, and having been, cultivated by the natives at the period 

 of European discoveries, inclines towards a supposition that 

 this plant is not a native of North America, but may possibly 

 have found its way thither with the earliest migrations from 

 some distant land. This might, indeed, have easily been the 

 case from South America, by way of the Isthmus of Panama ; 

 and the foundation of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations 

 (who we have reasons to consider as descendants from the 

 Tloseolians, and to have migrated to the eastward of the 

 river Mississippi, about the time of the Spanish conquest of 

 Mexico by Cortez), seems to have afforded one fair oppor- 

 tunity for its dissemination." 



The first knowledge which the English discoverers had of 

 the plant was in 1565 when they found it growing in Florida, 

 one hundred and seventy-three years after it was first dis- 

 covered by Columbus on the island of Cuba. Sir John 

 Hawkins says of its use in Florida : 



" The Floridians, when they travel, have a kind of herb 

 dried, which with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with 

 fire and the dried herbs put together, do suke through the 

 cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, 

 and therewith they live four or five dayes without meat or 

 drinke, and this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose : yet 

 do they holde opinion withall, that it causeth water and 

 steame to void from their stomacks." 



This preparation might not have been tobacco as the 

 Indians smoke a kind of bark which they scrape from the 

 killiconick, an aromatic shrub, in form resembling the willow; 



