Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  From Portugal, tobacco traveled to France thanks to the same person. Damião de Goes gave Jean Nicot seeds from his garden, and Nicot took them back to France to plant in his garden. This probably happened before 1559, when Nicot was appointed to be France’s ambassador to Portugal. Nicot then boasted that he was the first to bring tobacco to France, though another Frenchman, André Thevet, was the first to present Brazilian tobacco to the French queen, Catherine de Medici, in 1556. Thevet called it herbe de la royne in her honor, a name that went over into English for a time as “the queen’s weed.” But that name soon faded in favor of others. Nicot did get to put his name on smoking in one sense, since the Linnaean term for tobacco is Nicotiane (the source of the word we use today for the addictive nitrogenous compound in tobacco, nicotine).

  The history of tobacco’s transculturation into Europe looks a bit different when told from the vantage point of ordinary people. If Dodoens included it in his herbal, that could only be because someone showed it to him—someone who had either brought it from the Americas or got it from someone who did. And since Antwerp in the 1550s was northern Europe’s busiest port (Amsterdam would outclass it only in the next century), receiving as many as five hundred ships a day, that someone almost certainly stepped with it onto the Antwerp docks. The chain of knowledge ends in Dodoens’s herbology, but it must have begun among those who actually smoked the plant: sailors. A sailor would not have called it “queen’s weed” or “henbane.” He would have used the common Native American term “petum”—which is still with us in the name of a relative of the tobacco plant, the petunia.1 But why give Antwerp precedence when the first ships to cross the Atlantic were returning to Portuguese and Spanish ports? One source suggests that tobacco reached Portugal this way as early as 1548, two decades before Damião de Goes was writing about it, again probably in the pockets of sailors. So sailors, soldiers, and priests were the Europeans who started smoking first. Only later did aristocrats and other gentlemen adopt the taste and make it their own.

  The Spanish herbologist Juan de Cárdenas interested himself in the medicinal properties of tobacco, and includes the plant in his study of native medical practices published in Mexico in 1591. Cárdenas acknowledges that he has categorized it pharmacologically on the basis of how Spanish soldiers in Mexico were using it: to stave off cold, hunger, and thirst—just as the governor general’s soldiers on the northern Chinese border were doing in 1642. Europeans in the Americas acquired the idea that this is what tobacco did from Natives, who told them, as they told Jacques Cartier in the 1530s, that smoking kept them “healthy and warm.” So tobacco was more than just a barbarous practice. It was good for you. An English commentator explains in 1593 that it was tobacco’s medicinal properties that recommended it most strongly, especially to the damp and rheumatic English. Tobacco, he notes, was “gretlie taken-up and used in England, against Rewmes [colds] and some other diseases ingendered in the longes [lungs] and inward partes, and not without effect.” It was not only smoked, but made into a topical cream to rub into the skin. Offering greater precision, the English herbologist John Gerard in his herbal of 1597 notes that the herb “prevaileth against all apostemes [abscesses], tumours, inveterate ulcers, botches and such like, being made into an unguent or salve.” As of 1597, every English apothecary was prescribing the substance.

  The demand for tobacco medicine proved to be a moneymaker for apothecaries. As John Gerard happily admits, he used tobacco to treat “all cuts and hurts in the head, wherewith I have gotten both crownes and credit.” The profits elsewhere in the tobacco trade were even greater. When Virginian tobacco was still a novelty in England at the turn of the century, it was said that smokers would pay for its weight in silver. And when smokers pay huge sums to buy something, states like to collect huge duties when that something crosses the border. King James may have railed against smoking as a barbarian custom, but when the Virginia Company, which was importing tobacco from the English colony of that name, invited him to raise the import duty on tobacco to a level he found acceptable, he did. It seems, in fact, that his objection to tobacco was as much about revenue lost to smugglers as it was about its bad effect on his people.

  High prices and high duties of course encouraged both smugglers and farmers to get in on the business—as we noted for Beijing. Dutch farmers started growing tobacco as an import substitute about 1610, quickly making the Netherlands the biggest tobacco producer in Europe. Farmers in England did the same, though neither could match the quality of Virginian tobacco. As homegrown tobacco was much cheaper than the imported product and free of duty, the commercial solution was adulteration: mix local and imported and tell your customer he was getting the pure stuff. Dutch traders used this technique in the 1630s to undercut the English tobacco trade in the Baltic. Another method was to stew imported Virginian tobacco and then soak local tobacco in this liquid to improve its quality, though the results were not great. Still, pleasure and profit were able to work out a variety of arrangements—from smuggling to false advertising—that kept Europeans in tobacco during those early years.

  The profitable solution in the long run was to control both supply and quality at the source. This the Europeans accomplished by pushing aside Native producers in the Americas and setting up tobacco plantations. Tobacco would henceforth be grown by English planters, and the profits on the trade would remain within English hands. The demand for tobacco was strong enough by the 1610s to make colonization no longer just a speculative venture but an affordable one. As beaver pelts funded French exploration farther north, so tobacco gave the English the means to transplant themselves to Virginia and dispossess Natives of their land.

  Something else had to happen for tobacco to become a commercial crop. Tobacco farmers found that they needed more labor than their own families could supply. Although the Jesuits had some success getting Indians in South America to work on tobacco plantations, most were unwilling to work on them. Even if forced, they simply slipped away at night. The solution was to find people who had no choice but to do the work—slaves. The Dutch, ever with an eye to profitable business ventures, took the lead. Starting in the 1630s, another state-mandated corporation, the Westindische Compagnie, or West Indian Company—the WIC as distinct from the VOC—secured strong positions on both sides of the south Atlantic, buying slaves in Africa and selling them to tobacco plantation owners in the Caribbean and Brazil. The WIC lost most of these colonies in the 1640s as other traders got into the business, yet during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the WIC was running three to four slave ships a year to the Caribbean, exclusive of its ships serving South America.

  From this new labor arrangement, a new system of trade emerged. Tobacco (along with sugar) was a crop that could be used to make the Americas profitable, while Africa supplied the labor to make plantation production in the Americas feasible and South American silver paid for goods shipped from Europe and the Americas to Asia. Together the three prime commodities of the age—silver, tobacco, and slaves to mine the first and harvest the second—set the foundation on which the long-term colonization of the Americas rested. This sort of transnational arrangement, which gradually incorporated other commodities as well, became the pattern that enabled Europe to dominate much of the globe for the next three centuries.

  The global span of tobacco was not lost on contemporaries. In his satire on pretentious young men of fashion published in 1609, the English playwright Thomas Dekker addressed tobacco with this plea: “Make me thine adopted heire, that inheriting the vertues of thy whiffles, I may distribute them amongst all nations.” The tobacco-loving English were content to see everyone smoke, so long as tobacco agreed to “make the phantastick Englishman (above the rest) more cunning in the distinction of thy Rowle Trinidado, Leafe and Pudding, than the whitest toothed Blackamoore in all Asia.”2 Let the world become a fellowship of smokers, but let the English rise to the status of being its cleverest connoisseurs and the unique beneficiaries of its inspirational
qualities.

  DEKKER WAS NOT WRONG IN supposing that tobacco would soon spread “amongst all nations,” especially in Asia. He prophesied a little too early to know that China would become the foremost smoking nation, and the Chinese people even more enthusiastic to become tobacco’s “adopted heire” than the English. It took little time for what appeared to the English to be a moderate virtue among themselves to appear, when it arrived among the Chinese, like an immoderate vice. An Englishwoman who visited China in the nineteenth century felt entirely justified to criticize the Chinese passion for smoking by declaring the Chinese to be “as fond of smoking as the Turks.” This was not a compliment. She thought it was alright to smoke, just not to smoke to Turkish or Chinese excess.

  Tobacco traveled to China by three routes: an eastward Portuguese route from Brazil to Macao, a westward Spanish route from Mexico to Manila, and a third route that consisted of a series of hops around East Asia to Beijing. The first and second routes developed about the same time, with tobacco converging on Macao and Manila, and from these trading ports proceeding into China: from Macao into Guang-dong Province, and from Manila into Fujian Province farther up the coast. Certainly the habit was well entrenched by the first quarter of the seventeenth century, for when Adriano de las Cortes, the chronicler of the 1625 wreck of the Guía, came ashore near where these provinces meet, he discovered that the Chinese smoked. Las Cortes made the discovery at the end of his first day as a hostage. He was parched and made signs that he needed something to drink. His guards guessed correctly and gave him a bowl of hot water, which Chinese regard as more salubrious than cold water. Las Cortes was unused to drinking hot water and continued to mime, hoping for cold water. “They thought that I was actually asking for something else,” he reports, “so they brought me some tobacco to smoke.” Las Cortes wanted water, not tobacco, and in any case, being a Jesuit, was not permitted to smoke. He tried again to make himself understood and eventually, after much hilarity on the Chinese side, the charade was solved. They brought him a cup, not of cold water nor of hot, but of what he describes as “some hot water cooked with a herb called cha.” This was Las Cortes’s first encounter with tea. Tea had yet to transculturate its way into European society but by 1625, tobacco had become thoroughly entrenched along the China coast.

  Between Guangdong and Fujian Provinces, it was Fujian that gained the reputation as the home of tobacco in China. It arrived on Chinese ships coming from Manila into several ports, the most important of which was Moon Harbor, serving the prefectural city of Zhangzhou at the south end of the Fujian coast. Fang Yizhi, a brilliant seventeenth-century scholar much intrigued by knowledge of the outside world, dates its arrival in Fujian to the 1610s—some three decades before he slipped into Fujian disguised as a drug peddler to evade the Manchu armies overrunning south China in 1645. Fang identifies the Ma family of Zhangzhou as the biggest tobacco processors. They clearly made a success of the new product which spread like wildfire. “It gradually spread within all our borders, so that everyone now carries a long pipe and swallows the smoke after lighting it with fire. Some have become drunken addicts.”

  The word Fang uses for tobacco is danrouguo, “the fleshy fruit of the danbagu plant.” Danbagu was the name the Chinese in the Philippines used for tobacco. They coined it as a rough transliteration of the Spanish tabaco, which the Spanish had in turn transliterated from the Caribbean word for the hollow reed in which Caribbean Natives packed shredded tobacco leaves in order to smoke them. Danbagu was foreign sounding and awkward, so Chinese adapted their own word for “smoke” (yan) and came up with the expression chi yan, “eating smoke.” One Chinese author, looking back from the end of the seventeenth century, suspected it was the Japanese who coined the term yan (pronounced en in Japanese) for smoking. This is plausible, Japan being one of the stepping stones on tobacco’s third route into China. As en in Japanese is a loan word originally taken from Chinese, though, it is almost impossible to sort out how this word cycled between the two cultures—both of which continue to use it.3

  Chinese intellectuals puzzled over the question of where tobacco originally came from. Some assumed it was native to the Philippines, since that is whence it arrived in Fujian. Others suspected that the people in the Philippines “got their seeds from the Great Western Ocean,” a loose term for the distant region from which Europeans came. The thousands of Fujianese who traded with the Spanish in Manila knew the latter crossed the Pacific Ocean from a place called Yameilijia (America), and may have learned that this is where the seeds came from. But these were not the people who kept diaries or published essays. When it came to knowing about tobacco, the gap between the intelligentsia and ordinary people was as wide in seventeenth-century China as in Europe.

  From Fujian, the habit of smoking worked its way into the interior and up the maritime coast. The plant reached Shanghai in the 1630s, according to Ye Mengzhu, a sharp-eyed memoirist writing at the end of the century. “Tobacco comes originally from Fujian,” Ye begins, without bothering to guess where it came from before that. “When I was young, I heard my grandfathers say there was tobacco in Fujian, and that if you smoked it, it would make you drunk, so it was called ‘dry wine.’ There was none in this area.” He then explains that sometime in the late 1630s, a man surnamed Peng planted some in Shanghai. “I don’t know where he got the seeds from, but he planted them here, picked the leaves, dried them in the shade, and got workmen to cut them into threads. He then gave it to traveling merchants to sell elsewhere. Local people didn’t dare taste it.” The 1639 ban on cultivation in Beijing was enforced in Shanghai as well. Ye reports that the ban “stated that only bandits consume it to ward off the cold and damp, so people were not allowed to grow it and merchants were not allowed to sell it. Anyone breaking this law would be punished by analogy with the law against doing business with foreigners.” This prohibition had its effect in Shanghai. Peng was the first to be denounced and everyone else was scared away from cultivating the plant, though not for long. Soldiers were all smoking tobacco within a few years, Ye reports, and in no time peddlers were selling it again throughout the realm. It became profitable for growers, and yet it did not supplant cotton as Shanghai’s main commercial crop. “Very little is grown around here,” Ye observes at the end of his note.

  Macao-to-Guangdong and Manila-to-Fujian were the two first itineraries, but tobacco took a third route into China—a route that was effectively an extension of the first, but more complicated than either. Starting in Macao, it involved four steps. The first step was from Macao to the southernmost Japanese port of Nagasaki. Portuguese merchants sailing from Macao brought tobacco with them, and the Japanese were thrilled. Richard Cocks, who ran a short-lived English trading post there, was amazed at the new rage for tobacco. “It is strange,” Cocks observes in his diary, “to see how these Japons, men, women, and children, are besotted in drinking that herb; and, not ten years since it was in use first.” In his entry for 7 August 1615, he records that the local lord banned tobacco smoking and ordered all tobacco plants uprooted, to absolutely no effect. Tobacco had transferred effortlessly to Japanese culture. No official ban could stop it.

  Cocks’s comment that it was “not ten years since it was in use first” allows us to date the arrival of tobacco in Japan to about 1605. Once in Japan, tobacco took a second step, to Korea. The transfer was immediate, to judge from the comment of a Dutchman who was shipwrecked there in 1653. When he was surprised to see the locals smoking, his hosts told him that they had been smoking nampankoy or “the namban plant” (namban, “southern barbarian,” was what the Japanese called the Portuguese) already for half a century. The third step was from Korea to Manchuria. The Manchus rapidly became keen smokers, so much so that a French missionary in the nineteenth century assumed that smoking was one of the “usages” that the Manchus imposed on the Chinese. Hongtaiji, the khan who ruled the Manchus in the decades before their conquest of China, was not so happy that this usage had rooted itself among his me
n. When in 1635 he discovered that his soldiers were selling their weapons to buy tobacco, he imposed a smoking ban.

  Hongtaiji was not alone among rulers around the world who were concerned about the economic effects of smoking, nor was he uniquely ineffective. Two years earlier Sultan Murad IV outlawed the production, sale, and consumption of tobacco (as well as coffee) throughout the Ottoman Empire, stiffening earlier prohibitions by making these misdemeanors capital crimes—though this had no effect on his soldiers. A year before that, Christian IV of Denmark banned tobacco from being taken into Norway on the conviction that it was harmful to those of his subjects who lived there; eleven years later, Christian rescinded the ban as unenforceable. Hongtaiji had already done the same thing two years before that. Murad never rescinded his order, though his death in 1640 meant that the prohibition became defunct even before it was officially lifted in Norway and Manchuria.

  The final step on this third route was from Manchuria into northeast China, especially Beijing. There tobacco was known as the “southern herb,” though its arrival across the northeast border led some Chinese to suppose that tobacco was native to Korea. By 1637, the two types of tobacco fetching the best prices in Beijing were Fujianese and Manchurian. This is where Yang Shicong picks up the thread—and the association with sand grouse that leads him to suspect that smoking has to do with the Manchu threat on the border. The third route is thus a chain of links that no one could have predicted: the world empire of the Portuguese stretching from Brazil through Goa in India and up to Japan; the regional trading network of the Japanese into Korea; the circuit of exchange within the Korean peninsula that circulated goods up to Manchuria; and the cross-border trade between Manchuria and China that enabled the Manchus, thanks to their hugely profitable business in this and other commodities such as gold and ginseng, to finance their eventual conquest of China in 1644.