Ashes to Ashes Read Online Free PDF

gargle, and even as a dentifrice in the form of its ashes, said to be a superior whitener of teeth. Only a bit less persuasive was the claim for tobacco’s psychic powers; its smoke was said to drive off melancholy and other foul humours and improve the memory. Little wonder Nicot’s name has passed down to posterity linked to the narcotic substance unique to his beloved plant. In comparable fashion later in the sixteenth century,Raleigh became fixated with the leaf that the sea marauder Francis Drake brought home to Elizabethan England as booty from Spanish holds and so avidly encouraged its enjoyment and cultivation that he was said to have persuaded the queen herself to try a smoke. Courtiers and lesser dandies followed, regarding tobacco’s alleged medicinal uses as a ready rationale, and despite the almost prohibitive cost of the leaf, its smoke was soon rising everywhere from Cheapside alehouses to the soaring interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral during the liturgy.
    It should have come as scant surprise, however, when a plant of such storied curative and prophylactic qualities but of no known nutritional value soon ran afoul of the authorities, both temporal and ecclesiastical. Smoking officially became “the Indian vice,” a barbaric custom offensive to God, the pope, and the Koran; an invitation to debauchery; a peril to the public safety at a time when fire was a constant threat to crowded and closely built cities; and a usurper of cropland that would better have been devoted to grain or other nutrients than to tobacco, the idler’s plaything. It was denounced in Europe as a form of pagan savagery and in the Levant and the Orient as a wanton and seductive visitation of Christianity. Repressive steps shortly followed. Among the least of them, King James I of England raised the import duty on tobacco brought in Spanish galleons by 4,000 percent, the papacy banned smoking in its basilicas, and the czar of all the Russias exiled users of the illicit substance to Siberia. Deeper into the seventeenth century, more rigorous measures were employed: the Mogul emperor of Hindustan ordered smokers’ lips split; in China, traffickers in tobacco were executed; and in Turkey, Sultan Murad IV, greatly perturbed that Constantinople had gone up in flames and convinced that careless smoking was the cause, conducted a rudimentary sting operation on the streets of his empire—those he seduced with tobacco were made an example of by having a pipe driven through their noses, either immediately before or after their beheading.
    And yet the custom thrived, like all forbidden fruit. In England, the better-heeled taverngoer had his favorite long “churchwarden” pipe or short “nose warmer” awaiting his arrival. In France, nicotine-cravers began joyfully exploring their nostrils as a suitable venue for the pleasure. In Turkey, wary minstrels covertly sang of tobacco as one of “the four cushions of the couch of pleasure,” and in China, with exquisite understatement, poets referred to the plant as the “smoke-blossom”. What most of all spared tobacco from the scourges of xenophobia and righteousness, though, was the discovery by rulers in all lands that the commodity, beyond suppression now, could greatly enrich their treasuries with serious taxes on its import and sale. And nowhere was this more so than in England, whose North American colonies had become one of the world’s two prime suppliers.
    The influence of tobacco on prerevolutionary America and particularly onits largest and wealthiest colony, Virginia, cannot be overstated. The leaf grown in the new Spanish colonies of Mexico, Cuba, and the West Indies was of a high quality and fine flavor that won it a flourishing European market in the sixteenth century before English colonists settled in the New World. It was only natural, then, that early in the seventeenth century, the colony at Jamestown should turn to tobacco as its savior. The leaf grown there by the