ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the first contact phases between tobacco encountered by Europeans in the Americas and the effects of its spread from ‘New World’ to ‘Old’, largely through perusal of the poetic, dramatic and musical representations of tobacco in England at that time. At first tobacco was relatively insignificant, just one of a panoply of herbal products that the Iberian conquest of the Americas yielded to explorers and colonialists from Christopher Columbus onwards. The first European to write about the effects of tobacco smoking based on his own use of it, rather than relating what it looked like or its observable effects on others, was a Breton sailor, Jacques Cartier. Tobacco arrived in the Philippines from here in 1575, and proved a productive cash crop, one able to exploit the well-established, sophisticated trading networks maintained by Arab and Chinese merchants throughout Southeast Asia, where the Japanese also had significant settlements. Fujianese traders probably first introduced it to southern China.
