In 1614, the new colony at Jamestown in what is now Virginia was a death camp of starving colonists with little hope of survival.  The Indians were mad at them, the London Company was tired of sending supplies.  John Rolfe, who married Pocahantas, had learned to smoke tobacco while in London and decided to take a shot at cultivating tobacco in Jamestown, and not the Nicotiana Rustica of the local Indians but he chose the coveted Nicotiana Tabacum strain then being grown in Trinidad and South America–though Spain had declared a penalty of death to anyone selling such seeds to a non-Spaniard.  In 1614, in what has been called by at least one historian the most momentous event of the 17th century, the first shipment of Virginia tobacco was sold in London. Two years later, in June, 1616, Rolfe and other leaders of the colony arrived in London to discuss the newly successful crop.  Despite James I’s disapproval of the colony’s dependence on a crop he despised, the very survival of his namesake colony could be at stake. And, of course, James could not ignore the enormous import duties Rolfes’ Virginia tobacco, “Orinoco”, brought to the royal treasury–Londoners and others around the world liked its taste and began demanding it. Since all sales had to be made through London, the English treasury grew with every transaction.  Tobacco became such a popular crop that a law had to be passed to force some food cultivation in the suddenly affluent colony.  By 1619 Jamestown had exported 10 tons of tobacco to Europe and had left behind its dismal history of starvation, cannbalism and general debotchery. 

By 1639 Jamestown had exported 750 tons of tobacco. Tobacco was the American colonies’ chief export. The Jamestown colonists had not found gold, nor a route to the South Seas, nor the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. But they had found tobacco. Tobacco had brought the settlement from wretched failure to giddying success. Tobacco had created the need for labor at any price (even institutionalized slavery), and–since it wore out the soil every 4-7 years–the mad rush for land all through the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay–or, as the entire area soon became known, “Tobacco Coast.”

Tobacco can well be credited with making Jamestown the first permanent English colony in the New World.

So tobacco has been a critical crop and an ingrained habit for many years, well before cigarettes were even invented.  In fact, the prohibition against direct sales of tobacco to other countries (all such sales had to be made through London, where hefty excise taxes were levied) was one of the main aggravations leading to the American Revolution.

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