Christopher Columbus tends to get the credit for introducing tobacco to Europe after three of his 1492 journey crewmen found it at Hispaniola—modern day Dominican Republic. When they visited there during the trip the natives offered them peculiar smelling dried leaves. They also encountered the same leaves when they headed for Cuba where they eventually settled. There, the natives smoked dried tobacco leaves rolled and twisted into a crude form of a cigar. The ‘hobby’ of smoking quickly caught on among the sailors of many countries and it was also adopted by the Conquistadors, who took the idea back to Portugal and Spain. After Sir Walter Raleigh visited America he took smoking back to the British Isles in the form of pipes. People used a pipe with a small amount of tobacco in it as a pastime. At the end of the 1500’s a Spanish Galleon took over one hundred pounds of tobacco to the Philippine islands because of the high quality growing soil. The tobacco was distributed to Roman Catholic missionaries to plant.
Keep them Doggies Rolling
Cigars were the original form of rolling tobacco and were reserved mainly for men and for the well-off. The making of cigars became a huge industry, bringing jobs for many thousands of people. During the Ten Years’ War, Vicente Martinez Ybor relocated his cigar making operations Principe de Gales to Key West in Florida from its original home in Cuba. By the year 1905 the United States has over eighty thousand cigar manufacturing establishments, many of them ‘mom and pop’ operations. Most cigars were and still are rolled by hand and some of the most famous cigar smokers use various famous brand names, such as Swisher Sweets cigars or other well-known brands. King Edward VII was one of the most prominent cigar users, despite Queen Victoria’s hatred for them. Ulysses S. Grant was also a huge cigar smoker, getting through up to twelve each day. Sigmund Freud who is credited with saying ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ also enjoyed up to twenty of them each day. Of course we can’t forget one of the most modern iconic figures—Sir Winston Churchill—who also made smoking cigars a great hobby, along with Mark Twain, George Burns, Bill Cosby and Jack Benny.
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