TOBACCO

DURING THEIR FIRST YEAR in New England, the people of Plymouth allied with the Wampanoag leader Massasoit Ousamequin. The negotiations brought a Native encampment near to the newly constructed village and gave an opportunity for much interaction between the two. On the day after the negotiations, Massasoit sent to the village asking that some of the English come to visit him. Two men—Captain Miles Standish and Isaac Allerton—accepted the invitation. The anonymous author who described these events hinted that their willingness gave evidence of their bravery: they “went venturously.” In the presence of “King” Massasoit, they received a welcome “after their manner,” as well as a gift of “three or four ground Nuts, and some Tobacco.” After the two men returned to Plymouth, the governor sent a gift of English peas, “which pleased them well.”¹

The exchange of Indian tobacco (and groundnuts) for English peas might seem to capture the respective spirits of English and Native cultures, each side bestowing items familiar to the giver and exotic to the recipient. Yet the tobacco that Standish and Allerton received was not an unfamiliar gift for the two men newly arrived in New England. Both knew the plant and quite likely had smoked it before landing on the American shores where it originated. Although an anonymous author who described the encounter made clear that on both sides the meeting brought wonders, tobacco did not fall into that category. The English author thought he needed to describe in detail the Native complexion (like that of “our English gypsies”) and attire. He also explained that the Wampanoag were equally interested in such novelties as a trumpet.² Yet tobacco proved one aspect of Native culture that the author felt no need to describe. As an English man—and quite possible one who had lived in Leiden for a time—he knew this American plant, and he seems to have expected his readers to know it too. Tobacco, a plant central to Native cultural practice, had also—over the previous decades—become firmly embedded in Western European culture.

An American plant, tobacco grew as far north as New England and as far south as the Caribbean islands and South America. In many locations, Native peoples used it for ceremonial purposes. When Massasoit shared tobacco, his action was of course sociable, but it also had a ritual component related to cementing an alliance. In that meeting, the English observers noted that Massasoit carried tobacco in a pouch on his person; they also observed that his people awaited his permission to partake. Hence, in this moment at least, no Native person casually smoked—or in the English term of the day, “drank”—tobacco; they waited until their leader invited them to do so.³ As they described: “In his Attire little or nothing differing from the rest of his followers, only in a great Chain of white bone Beads about his neck, and at it behind his neck, hangs a little bag of Tobacco, which he drank and gave us to drink.”⁴ On other occasions, Native men offered tobacco as a way to make amends. When a party of English men journeying through the country encountered a former guide who had abandoned them earlier, the erstwhile guide tried to mend their relationship by sharing tobacco. They declined—believing the tobacco to have been stolen—but his gesture hinted at the symbolic use of the plant in sealing friendship.⁵ On other occasions, Native peoples marked moments of reconciliation by sharing tobacco.⁶

Native peoples also used the plant for personal needs, possibly even for its appetite-suppressing qualities. The early accounts of Plymouth—especially the Relation or Journall that recounted the events of the first year—mentioned tobacco frequently. Besides remarking on tobacco’s symbolic purposes, the various narratives included in the Relation refer to tobacco use at other times. On a later, less formal visit to Massasoit, a group of Plymouth men sat with him smoking tobacco and discussing England. It was on this occasion that Massasoit learned that the widowed King James had not remarried, a revelation that caused the Native leader to marvel.⁷ The English undertook that particular journey during a time of want, when the local population had no food reserves. Massasoit himself apologized for having little to give them, and the Native men with whom they traveled ate little, tightened their belts, and smoked tobacco.⁸ For their part, the English found it excruciating to hike through the woods without food and tried to hurry home where their own stores could sustain them.

Tobacco, an integral part of Native cultural practice, also had a place in English experience by 1620 as well. English awareness of this American plant dated to the previous century when travelers encountered it and brought it to England. Sir Walter Raleigh—who encountered the plant on a voyage to the Americas—offers a famous case in point, but other seamen no doubt gained access to tobacco in their journeys as well. Its use was sufficiently widespread by 1604 that the new king, James I, authored a pamphlet against the “loathsome” custom, A Counterblaste to Tobacco. His efforts had no discernable effect on rising use. In fact, during the decade that followed, the Virginia Company hit on tobacco as an export crop, and by 1620 Virginia planters shipped a great deal of the plant to be consumed in England. By that time, tobacco had become a standard vice, to the point that Captain Levett, explaining why one prospective settler’s efforts came to naught, declared that the man, “a base lazy fellow,” had run through his funds in London before embarking by spending on wine, women, and tobacco.⁹ At the same time, mariners and traders from other European countries were similarly introducing the tobacco leaf to consumers. Leiden residents were familiar with it, as the local university was known for its tobacco-obsessed students.¹⁰ Whether in England or in Leiden, many Plymouth residents would have been familiar with the plant before they arrived in America.

This image, “The Landing of the Fathers at Plymouth, Dec. 22: 1620,” communicates the challenges faced by the first arrivals. Its inscription refers to “the desert land.” Far from a desert land—whether we understand that to mean empty or unproductive—New England included people (although no one that dressed as the figure depicted here) and the crops, like tobacco, that they grew.

Tobacco was an established Atlantic commodity by the time Plymouth was founded. That people native to the Americas were its original users, that it had been introduced to Europe, and that it had become a desirable consumer good for many Western Europeans made it the first commodity from the Americas to be widely consumed elsewhere. In that regard, it anticipated other American goods like chocolate, which had long since been served as a beverage in Spain but which had yet to become a widely enjoyed drink in Europe more generally. Unlike sugar or coffee, which would also become important crops grown in America for export to Europe, tobacco had in common with chocolate the fact that it came originally from the Americas: both were American plants that became transatlantic commodities. While it is likely that someone on the Mayflower brought tobacco with them for their own use, the new arrivals in Plymouth soon found themselves consuming the locally grown plant, first with Indian hosts who shared and then by acquiring, and eventually growing, the leaf for their own use. In an interesting contrast to other commodities, the familiar plant no longer circulated as far as it once had in order to fit into Plymouth consumption habits. The settlers had come to tobacco, having already experienced it coming to them.

As with many innovations, the far-sighted Edward Winslow perceived that tobacco might become a New England export crop. In his Good Newes from New England, he departed from his narrative of events to include a chapter on the area’s prospects. In it, he mentioned that New England might in fact be an island, with the Hudson River dividing it from the mainland. He then went on to describe the local climate and the ubiquity of Native corn—“Indian Maize or Ginny-Wheat”—as a staple of the residents’ diet. He extolled the prospects for a trade in furs and ended noting that tobacco might also offer a modest hope of yielding profit.¹¹ The quality of New England tobacco made it unlikely to compete with that grown in Virginia, and Winslow’s demur no doubt arose from that awareness. A later Plymouth law—only briefly on the books before it was repealed—illegalized the import of “foreign” tobacco, probably a reference to that grown farther south in either Virginia or the English Caribbean colonies. Presumably the law intended to keep local consumption confined to locally grown product.

By that time, New England tobacco had become an object of local consumption. While records of who consumed it, when, and how are few, when Plymouth decided to regulate its consumption, the court records revealed some answers both to how the leaf was used and how magistrates wanted to see it used. A law passed in 1638 focused on where it was smoked. The court objected that people were “taking Tobacco in a very uncivil manner openly in the Towne streets.” They also expressed alarm that men smoked as they “pass upon the highways” as well as while at work “in the woods and fields.” The problems that arose were described as twofold: the men neglected their labors with frequent smoke breaks; they also brought “great reproach” on the government. Why the latter was the case, the record did not state. In any event, the government imposed a fine on anyone found taking it in the outbuildings, highways, and fields, anywhere “he doth not dyne or eat his meat.” As a concession to the inveterate smoker who needed a pipe of tobacco during his workday, the court agreed that a man working a mile or more away from home could enjoy the weed without punishment.¹² Clearly by this time, Plymouth residents consumed a great deal of tobacco. Soon the grand jury presented three men for ignoring the rule, but did not explain where the trio had imbibed or indeed whether they had been together at the time that they did so.¹³ Jurors were not immune to the allure of tobacco either, and the courts eventually declared it illegal to smoke while sitting on a jury.¹⁴

Tobacco in Plymouth proved far more than an Atlantic commodity. In Native culture in New England as elsewhere, tobacco had ceremonial purposes but was also used medicinally and socially. Plymouth migrants entered a Native world in which tobacco had an established place. Local uses—the details of its place in Native New England—may have been unfamiliar but tobacco most assuredly was not. The European arrivals were familiar with this American commodity that was readily available in London and Leiden. In Plymouth, colonists quickly incorporated the plant into their regular routines, presumably growing it for personal use. No notable export market ever developed, nor is there any indication that New England tobacco was sufficiently prized to warrant sending it as a gift to any English correspondent. Tobacco meant many things in Plymouth: used in ritual and medicine in Native communities, it became an object of consumption and contention among the English.

Even as tobacco became part of the European experience on both sides of the Atlantic, it continued to carry associations with America. Emmanuel Altham, Plymouth investor and occasional resident, gifted his brother with a tobacco pipe (or perhaps two) acquired in New England. In 1625, he wrote that he had entrusted to Edward Winslow, “an Indian tobacco pipe, being the first and rarest that ever I saw. I desire you keep it for my sake, it being a great king’s pipe in this country.” He also felt the need to apologize for the pipe’s odor, noting “the pipe cannot be transformed to a better smell, for it doth stink exceedingly of Indian tobacco.”¹⁵ While not offering a ringing endorsement of either the local product or, for that matter, his gift, Altham still thought his brother should give Winslow some wine for his trouble. Altham’s gift traded on the exoticism of an Indian king’s tobacco pipe, a novelty item that his brother might be pleased to show off (in spite of its nasty odor). His brother might well have been a smoker already, as many English men had come to partake over the previous decades. In any event, the pipe referenced the connection to America that his brother’s Plymouth business ventures and occasional visits created. Tobacco, both increasingly familiar and still decidedly American, bridged the Atlantic.

Tobacco would of course have a long history. It remains an important crop in some regions in North America, and it is increasingly derided for its addictive qualities and its deadly side effects. To this day, inveterate smokers like to partake after a meal, and those who give up tobacco often complain that they miss its appetite-suppressing qualities. Long before it became a multimillion-dollar industry and the subject of studies and lawsuits, tobacco had an important role in the English Atlantic. Tobacco reveals the transatlantic circulation of things as well as any item can.