When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he expected spices, gold, and new trade routes. What he didn’t anticipate was smoke. On the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, he and his crew observed the local Arawak and Taíno peoples inhaling smoke through rolled leaves or hollow tubes—something no European had ever seen.
Columbus noted the custom in his journals, describing how the Indigenous people “drank the smoke” of certain dried leaves. One of his crewmen, Rodrigo de Jerez, became particularly intrigued. He tried smoking himself and brought the habit back to Spain. But the sight of smoke coming from a man’s mouth was so unsettling to his neighbors that he was reportedly imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for practicing witchcraft.
Despite this initial shock, tobacco—and the act of smoking—quickly caught the attention of Europeans. Sailors and explorers returning from the New World brought tobacco leaves and seeds with them, along with stories of its use. What began as a strange island ritual soon became a subject of fascination in European courts and port cities.
Columbus and his crew had unknowingly brought to Europe a plant that would ignite global interest and influence cultural habits for centuries. While the original meaning of pipe smoking among Indigenous peoples was largely overlooked, the pipe remained—adopted in new contexts and used as a social and personal pastime across European society.
Sources:
- Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, translated by Nigel Griffin, Penguin Books, 1992.
- Joseph C. Winter, Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.
- Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization, Grove Press, 2003.
- Andrew T. Weil, The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness, Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
- Wilbert, Johannes. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America, Yale University Press, 1987.
- Primary excerpts from The Journal of Christopher Columbus (1492), translated by Cecil Jane, as republished by the University of Oklahoma Press.
