No Smoke Without Fire
Sir Walter Raleigh was within his rights to experiment with the Native American habit of smoking tobacco, but he should have told his servants first.
1586
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603 to King James I 1603-1625
Sir Walter Raleigh was within his rights to experiment with the Native American habit of smoking tobacco, but he should have told his servants first.
1586
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603 to King James I 1603-1625
In 1585, Walter Raleigh led an ambitious project to found a colony at Roanoke Island in North America. The settlers returned after just one year, bringing with them a habit picked up from the Native Americans of that region: smoking tobacco leaves. His scientific adviser Thomas Harriot (?1560-1621) thought tobacco’s health benefits in our foggy isle so many that to list them ‘would require a volume by it selfe’.
IT is asserted by Camden, that tobacco was now for the first time brought into England by these settlers;* and there can be little doubt that Lane had been directed to import it by his master,* who must have seen it used in France during his residence there.*
There is a well-known tradition* that Sir Walter first began to smoke it privately in his study, and the servant coming in with his tankard of ale and nutmeg, as he was intent upon his book, seeing the smoke issuing from his mouth, threw all the liquor in his face by way of extinguishing the fire, and running down stairs, alarmed the family with piercing cries, that his master, before they could get up, would be burnt to ashes.
* That is, it was brought home to England in 1586 by settlers returning from the Roanoke Colony in Virginia that Raleigh tried so hard to set up, but without success. See The Lost Colony of Roanoke. William Camden (1551-1623) was the compiler of The Annals of Queen Elizabeth, first published in 1615; the relevant passage appears under 1585 though in fact the settlers came back the following year. “These men which were brought back” wrote Camden “were the first that I know of, which brought into England that Indian plant which they call Tabacca, and Nicotia, and use it against crudities [ill-digested food], being taught it by the Indians. Certainly from that time it began to be in great request, and to be sold at an high rate, whilst very many everywhere, some for wantonness, some for health, suck in with insatiable greediness the stinking smoke thereof through an earthen pipe, and presently snuff it out at their nostrils, insomuch as Tabacca shops are kept in Towns everywhere no less then tap-houses and taverns.”
* Sir Ralph Lane (?1532-1603) had been Governor of the Roanoke colony. Raleigh did not accompany the settlers, much as he wanted to: Queen Elizabeth I insisted that he remain in England.
* Raleigh went to France in 1569, to gain military experience in the religious wars between the Roman Catholic authorities and the Huguenots, France’s Protestant community, who were severely persecuted under the Inquisition. Tytler surmises that Raleigh had at least heard rumour of tobacco there: in letters to King Francis I of France (r. 1515-1547), explorers Jacques Cartier in the Gulf of St Lawrence (1535-40) and John de Verrazzano in Florida (1524) had both described its use by indigenous peoples.
* For this account, Tytler is (as he says) indebted to William Oldys (1696-1761), who described it in The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh From His Birth to His Death on the Scaffold (1749).
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.