18 TOBACCO IN AMERICA. 



Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who was chaplain to 

 Cortez, when he made conquest of Mexico in 1519, 

 speaks of smoking as an established custom among the 

 people ; and Bernal Diaz relates that the king Monte- 

 zuma had his j)ipe brought with much ceremony by the 

 chief ladies of his court, after he had dined and 

 washed his mouth with scented water. In the vicinity 

 of the city of Mexico large quantities of clay tobacco 

 pipes have been dug up of various fanciful forms, 

 which show that as great an amount of attention was 

 bestowed on their decoration by the old Mexicans, as 

 we have devoted to them in Europe. Our engraving 



exhibits one of 

 very remark- 

 able form ; it 

 represents a 

 male figure with the characteristic features of the 

 Mexican type, at the back is the aperture for con- 

 suming the tobacco, which is smoked through the 

 straight leg ; the bent one acting as a handle.* The 

 ears of the figure are bored for the insertion of pendant 

 ornaments, which the natives devoted as willingly to 

 the heads of their pipes, as to their own. 



In the History of the New World, by Giralamo 

 Benzoni of Milan, narrating his travels in America 

 from 1541 to 1556 (and which has been translated 

 from the Venetian edition of 1573 by Rear- Admiral 



* In our chapter on Pipes is engraved a clay pipe of English make, pre- 

 cisely on the same principle, and is a curious example of undesigned coin- 

 cidence, or of the unchanging essential modes of tobacco smoking. 



