Chapter 6 - Drugs?

Summary

According to the Italian cultural historian Piero Camporesi, much of early modern Europe lived in a drugged state, accidentally induced by famine or from eating moldy bread and stale food, or sometimes deliberately by consuming fermented drinks, mushrooms, poppy seeds, and other distillations or sniffing lotions, oils, and other essences. People throughout history, especially the young who were receptive to novelty, experimented with recreational substances to reach a narcotic state. In the late Middle Ages, brewers spiked beers with herbs such as black henbane seed, thorn apples and belladonna for their hallucinogenic effects, and in the 1660s young men visited coffeehouses to enjoy the effects of caffeine. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, smoking tobacco was a new habit of a similar caliber. In the late sixteenth century, the Dutch historian Emanuel van Meteren described smoking: ‘you put a bit of dried powder in a small bowl the size of a hazelnut, light it with a candle or glowing coal, and inhale the smoke through a pipe-stem, then blow it out your nostrils. That is what people call drinking a pipe of tobacco’. Between 1590 and 1650, the Dutch Republic went from a non-smoking nation to a country full of pipe-smokers, known as the tobaccophiles of Europe. During the first part of the seventeenth century, the use of tobacco became so widespread in Dutch society that it was not uncommon for an executioner to allow a convicted criminal a pipe of tobacco as a last request. Given the addictive craving for nicotine, the Dutch West India Company started a lucrative trade in tobacco with the English Jamestown colony. The first trade contracts between Holland and Virginia were drafted before 1620 with the Company of Merchant Adventurers of Middelburg. By the 1630s the trade shifted to Rotterdam, which became the center of the tobacco business with Virginia and the West Indies. After the early 1620s the English government imposed restrictions on the trade between its own colonies and Holland, and New Netherland, the Dutch West India Company's own colony in North America. Numerous colonists in New Netherland who were employed in other occupations grew tobacco as a cash crop to supplement their incomes, even New Amsterdam's minister, Evert Willemsz.