THE HOME OF THE INDIAN WEED 37 



invested with supreme autiiority as admiral, viceroy, and 

 captain-general of all islands and continents in the Western 

 Ocean. Second in authority was Gonzalo Fernandez de 

 Oviedo, who accompained the expedition bearing the royal 

 commission of inspector-general of the AVest India Islands. 

 By the end of September 1493 '^he fleet was speeding its 

 way towards the Far West, and with favouring gales was 

 wafted straight amongst the Windward Islands. Had some 

 good genius guided their course across the deep in order to 

 disclose to them the beauties of the new world, no fairer 

 island could have been found than the one which, on that 

 bright morning in January 1494 lay before the adventurers 

 as the great master mariner steered his vessel into the safe 

 harbour of Hayti — land of mountains. The climate was 

 perfect ; a perpetual summer was tempered by cool 

 mountain breezes and periodical showers, which swept 

 in from the Atlantic. By the banks of this beautiful 

 harbour, on the north shore, Columbus planted the first 

 Spanish settlement, and in grateful tribute to the Queen he 

 named it Isabella. The country, which in all probability 

 he believed to be the continent he was in search of, he 

 named San Domingo, a name which soon disappears from 

 the records, substituted by that of Hispaniola. From this 

 island came to Europe the first written allusion to the use 

 of tobacco by the natives. It is from Fra Ramono Pane, 

 a Franciscan, whom Columbus had left at Hayti. In a 

 letter to his friend Peter Martyr, Queen Isabel's secretary, 

 he tells him of a curious practice said to be common among 

 the natives of rubbing the dried leaves of a herb into a 

 powder, and then with a hollow forked tube, two prongs of 

 which they put up their nostrils while holding the lower 

 one in the powder, ' they drew the powder into their noses, 

 which purges them very much of humours. . . . The 



