of
Virginia is a native production of the country; but whether
it was found in a state of natural growth there, or a plant
cultivated by the Indian natives, is a point of which we are
not informed, nor which ever can be farther elucidated than
by the corroboration of historical facts and conjectures. I
have been thirty years ago, and the greatest part of my time
during that period, intimately acquainted with the interior
parts of America; and have been much in the unsettled parts
of the country, among those kinds of soil which are
favorable to the cultivation of tobacco; but I do not
recollect one single instance where I have met with tobacco
growing wild in the woods, although I have often found a few
spontaneous plants about the arable and trodden grounds of
deserted habitations. This circumstance, as well as that of
its being now, and having been, cultivated by the natives at
the period of European discoveries, inclines towards a
supposition that this plant is not a native of North
America, but may possibly have found its way thither with
the earliest migrations from some distant land. This might,
indeed, have easily been the case from South America, by way
of the Isthmus of Panama; and the foundation of the Choctaw
and Chickasaw nations (who we have reasons to consider as
descendants from the Tloseolians, and to have migrated to
the eastward of the river Mississippi, about the time of the
Spanish conquest of Mexico by Cortez), seems to have
afforded one fair opportunity for its dissemination."

The first knowledge which the English discoverers had of the plant was
in 1565 when they found it growing in Florida, one hundred and
seventy-three years after it was first discovered by Columbus on the
island of Cuba. Sir John Hawkins says of its use in Florida:--

"The Floridians, when they travel, have a kind of herb
dried, which with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with
fire and the dried herbs put together, do suke through the
cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger,
and therewith they live four or five dayes without meat or
drinke, and this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose:
yet do they holde opinion withall, that it causeth water and
steame to void from their stomacks."

This preparation might not have been tobacco