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The tobacco plant
has captivated the imaginations of artists, poets, craftsmen, and musicians at least as long
as history has recorded its existence. Early
Aztec frescos in Mexico illustrated ancient myths in which gods bequeathed
tobacco to mortals. Rituals involving tobacco were sacred to ancient peoples
throughout the Americas, and their instruments of ceremony were lovingly
crafted. José de Acosta, a Spanish Jesuit missionary dispatched to Peru
in 1571, recorded some of the earliest and most vivid descriptions of
Native South American life European readers had yet seen. De natura
novi orbis libri duo (Salamanca,
1588-1589) was followed by a more illustrious work, Historia natural
y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590) in which the native use of
tobacco was described in detail.
This popular work was published in
Spanish and quickly translated into Italian, French,
Dutch, German, Latin and English, thus augmenting a budding European taste
for the new plant and its attendant rituals.
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Once Spanish and English explorers introduced
their countrymen to the new plant, the use
of tobacco became vogue in sixteenth-century Europe. Social conventions
of smoking tobacco
and "taking" snuff soon inspired beautifully
designed pipes and snuff
boxes. Interest in the smoking practices of other cultures spread as Europeans
traversed the globe, and these were noted
and incorporated into the burgeoning culture of tobacco. Tobacco was
most likely introduced to Africa by Portugese slave traders in the 16th
century via Brazil. William Finch, an English
trader with the Dutch East India Company, observed that the denizons of
Sierra Leone, men and women, not only smoked but also cultivated tobacco
in plots around their homes. Enlivened trade with India in this period acquainted
the European explorers with the water pipe, which was used to smoke a blend
of tobacco mixed with fragrant herbs such as rose and sandalwood. |
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Tobacco has been the target of temperance movements as long as it has been championed
by its proponents. Many early chroniclers of tobacco use noted that it
had many medicinal functions on the American continents. But repeated
habitual indulgence in tobacco products proved to be harmful to people and curative claims ceased.
Stories, songs, and works of art have continued to document and celebrate or condemn
tobacco ever since.
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