1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [45]
John Ferrar never reconciled himself to the loss. Twenty-five years after the company’s demise, he read William Bullock’s Virginia Impartially Examined, a sixty-six-page tract that blamed him and other managers for Jamestown’s troubles. Ferrar filled the margins of his copy with irate rejoinders. Bullock had written that the colony could prosper only by diversifying; rather than focusing exclusively on tobacco, the colonists should have grown wheat and barley. To Ferrar, this was like telling people who were riding off a cliff that they should wear jackets of another color. As far as he was concerned, Virginia’s mistake had been to ignore what Sir Francis Drake had learned during the 1570s, when he stopped in California during his round-the-world voyage. Drake had proven—proven!—that the Americas were at most a few hundred miles across. Jamestown’s failure to cut through the continent and pioneer a new route to Asia, Ferrar wrote, “is to this day the greatest Error and damadge that hath happened to the Collony all this while.” He was certain that only “8 or 10 days March[,] naye it maybe not a 4 days Journy” separated Jamestown and the Pacific. A single expedition west would have discovered “Soe Infinite a Riches to them all as a passadge to a West Sea would prove to them.” Instead, they had stupidly filled their days with “Smokey Tobaco.”
From today’s vantage the story seems more complex. The goal of the Virginia Company had been to integrate Virginia, and thus poor England itself, into the rich new global marketplace. Although Ferrar never recognized it, the company had done exactly that—with “Smokey Tobaco,” the first American species to disperse into Europe, Asia, and Africa. Fun, exciting, and wildly addictive, tobacco was an instant hit around the globe—the first time people in every continent simultaneously became enraptured by a novelty. N. tabacum was the leading edge of the Columbian Exchange.
By 1607, when Jamestown was founded, tobacco was enthralling the upper classes in Delhi, where the first smoker, to the dismay of his advisers, was none other than the Mughal emperor; thriving in Nagasaki, despite a ban promulgated by the alarmed daimyo; and addicting sailors in Istanbul to such an extent that they were extorting it from passing European vessels. In that same year a traveler in Sierra Leone observed that tobacco, likely brought by slave traders, could be found “about every man’s house, which seemeth half their food.” Nicotine addiction became so rampant so quickly in Manchuria, according to the Oxford historian Timothy Brook, that in 1635 the khan Hongtaiji discovered that his soldiers “were selling their weapons to buy tobacco.” The khan angrily prohibited smoking. On the opposite side of the world, Europeans were equally hooked; by the 1640s the Vatican was receiving complaints that priests were celebrating Mass with lighted cigars. Pope Urban VIII, as enraged as Hongtaiji, promptly banned smoking in church.
From Bristol to Boston to Beijing, people became part of an international culture of tobacco. Virginia played a small but important part in creating this worldwide phenomenon. From today’s perspective, though, N. tabacum in the end was less important in itself than as a magnet that pulled many other nonhuman creatures, directly and indirectly, across the Atlantic, of which the most important surely were two minute, multifaceted immigrants, Plasmo-dium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum—names little known outside specialist circles, but ones that played a devastating role in American life.
1 In recent years, advanced techniques have let researchers domesticate a few previously undomesticable species in laboratory settings—the silver fox is the most well-known example. In all previous history, though, only about forty large animals