For some eight thousand years tobacco has grown on earth. It is thought that it started growing in the Americas around 6,000 BC. However, it was not until around 1,000 years BC that people started to use the leaves of the tobacco plant for smoking and chewing.

The Arawaks
It was centuries later that the great explorers, when they set out from Europe in search of the Orient, discovered tobacco in the Americas. Most famously, in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Palos in Spain and landed at the island he named 'San Salvador'. Columbus was greeted by fascinated native Arawaks who thought that he and his men were divine beings sent from the Gods.

Later in the same year Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis Torres landed on the Caribbean island of Cuba, en route to discover China. Jerez and Torres are believed to have been the first Europeans to observe smoking of tobacco, when they witnessed inhabitants wrapping tobacco leaves in palm or maize and lighting one end and drinking smoke from the other. Indeed, Jerez is thought to be the first smoker from outside the Americas.

On his return to Spain, Jerez frightened the local people who were amazed to see smoke coming from his mouth and nose. The holy inquisitors, who were influential in Spain at the time, are understood to have thought that Jerez was possessed by the devil and imprisoned him for seven years. Ironically, by the time he was released, smoking had become a custom in Spain

In 1526, the Spanish writer Don Gonzalo Fernadez de Oviedo y Valdes – nice name – wrote: ‘Among other evil practises, the Indians have one that is especially harmful, the inhaling of a certain kind of smoke which they call tobacco. I cannot imagine what pleasure they derive from this practise.’ That’s the first recorded mention of the word ‘tobacco’.

Queen Elizabeth I’s successor, James I, had a very different attitude. He hated smoking. He wrote a famous pamphlet, ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, which was published in 1603. James knew that tobacco was dangerous, even though there was no scientific proof. He wrote: ‘If a man smokes himself to death (and many have done) O then some other disease must bear the blame for all that fault.’ He famously described smoking as ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.’

Pipe smoking was very trendy in England in the 17^th century. Many people believed that tobacco would improve their health. During the plague, in 1665, boys at Eton school were made to smoke a pipe of tobacco every morning, to make them strong! One boy refused to smoke his pipe. He was flogged.

In the 18^th century, snuff was very popular. Snuff was a kind of powdered tobacco which people snorted up their noses. It was considered more elegant than pipe smoking. But it made people sneeze, big time!

King George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte, loved snuff so much that she was known as ‘Snuffy Charlotte.’

The French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte got through 7lbs of snuff a month.

In the 19^th century, cigars became the most popular smoke. Cigarettes also appeared. Nobody knows who invented them; probably the Spanish or the French; maybe Egyptian soldiers. They began to be mass produced in 1872 and become hugely popular very fast. Cigarettes were cheap and very, very addictive.

In the first half of the 20^th century, many people thought that smoking was very good for health. Some doctors even recommended cigarettes for sore throats.

Plenty of people through history, though, guessed that smoking was bad for health. But nobody could conclusively prove it before 1950 when Doctors Bradford Hill and Richard Doll in England, and Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the USA linked the habit to lung cancer.