20 TOBACCO IN AMERICA. 



this herb, which in the Mexican language is called 

 tobacco, and immediately perceiving the sharp fetid 

 smell of this truly diabolical and stinking smoke. I 

 was obliged to go away in haste, and seek some other 

 place.* 



" In La Espailola and the other islands, when their 

 doctors wanted to cure a sick man, they went to the 

 place where they were to administer the smoke, and 

 when he was thoroughly intoxicated by it, the cure 

 was mostly effected. On returning to his senses, he 

 told a thousand stories of his having been at the 

 council of the gods, and other high visions." Benzoni 

 gives a woodcut of the ceremony of tobacco-taking 

 by means of inhalation at the mouth from a pipe ; a 

 second figure has dropped the pipe, and lies on his 

 back in a state of insensibility, while a third is tended 

 by a physician in his hamoc, the origin of those used 

 by our sailors. 



In North America the custom was even more gene- 

 ral.! Not one tribe was found to be unacquainted 

 with the habit when they were first discovered by 

 European travellers ; and it is generally supposed the 

 custom had its origin among them. The old Indian 

 tradition favours this belief, which is thus related by 



* This is strong language ! Benzoni was evidently not the man to 

 introduce smoking to Venice ! Admiral Smyth remarks on this passage: 

 "Surely the royal author of the famous Counterblast must have seen this 

 graphic and early description of a cigar ! " 



+ The Indians were so constant in their devotions to the pipe, that they 

 ■used them as Europeans use a watch, and in reckoning the time anything 

 occupied would say, "I was one pipe (of time) about it.'v 



