CHAPTEE II. 



TOBACCO IN AMERICA. 



It was in the first week of November, 1492, that 

 Europeans ■ first noted the Indian custom of tobacco- 

 smoking. The two sailors sent by Columbus to ex- 

 plore Cuba returned to the ships of their great com- 

 mander, and told this among other things new and 

 strange. They found the natives carried with them a 

 lighted firebrand, and puffed smoke from their mouths 

 and noses ; this their European notions led them to 

 conclude was some mode of perfuming themselves. 

 A more intimate acquaintance with the natives, taught 

 them that it was certain leaves of a herb rolled up in 

 the dried leaves of the maize or Indian corn, that they 

 thus burned, and inhaled the smoke. It was a novelty 

 to the Spaniards, but it was an ancient and familiar 

 custom with the natives: " the aborigines of Central 

 America rolled up the tobacco -leaf, and dreamed away 

 their lives in smoky reveries ages before Columbus was 

 born, or the colonists of Sir Walter Raleigh brought it 

 within the precincts of the Elizabethan court. The 

 cocoa-leaf, now the comfort and strength of the Peru- 

 vian muletero, was chewed as he does it, in far remote 



