Drinking Smoke: The Tobacco Syndemic in Oceania

Notes

225 Notes Chapter 1: Introduction and Historical Background 1. To put this in perspective consider this: “Every day, HIV/AIDS kills nearly 8,500 people around the world. Tuberculosis claims 5,000 lives. Close to 3,000 succumb to malaria. Yet another infectious disease, a socially infectious disease , claims the greatest mortality toll of all: consumption of tobacco. During any given 24 hours, over 13,500 worldwide lose their lives to diseases caused by tobacco, most from smoking cigarettes” (Warner and Mackay 2006, 65). 2. Well more than a hundred years ago Ernst noted that one definition of drink in Webster’s dictionary is “to inhale,” and he then cited several sources from England in the early 1600s where “drinking tobacco” referred not simply to inhalation of the smoke but rather to the actual swallowing of it, “which was the mode in England at the time” (1889, 142). 3. That one “drank” tobacco in Japan—tabako wo nomu—is reinforced by Satow’s 1877 account of its introduction there (2002, 79). 4. In at least one recorded instance islanders literally “drank tobacco.” A group on Normanby Island, upon encountering the substance for the first time, “put the tobacco into a bottle we had given them, poured water upon it and drank off the compound” (Thomson 1889, 536). And of Ifaluk Atoll’s inhabitants in the Caroline Islands, “When they first saw tobacco, they ate it, thinking that it was food” (Levesque 1995, 247). 5. The biggest of these ships weighed 7,800 tons and “were three times the size of anything the British navy put afloat before the 1800s” (Pomeranz and Topik 2006, 47). 226 Notes to Pages 14–16 6. Shineberg (1971, 73–74) documents that there were two “Royal Cigar manufactories ” in the Philippines by at least the 1840s and these employed a total of fifteen thousand people! Most of these employees were women, each of whom made about two hundred cigars per day. Along with sugar, coffee, and hemp, cigars were among the important exports from the Philippines in those days. 7. During the seventeenth century tobacco became a major cash crop in China, “spreading inland from the coast to Yunnan, to northwestern China, and to the valley of the lower Yangtze” (Wolf 1982, 256). 8. According to Henry Frei, “An estimated 10,000 Japanese left their country between 1604 and 1635 to expand trade at the behest of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Between 7,000 and 10,000 of them took up permanent residience [sic] in one of the numerous Japanese settlements that then dotted Southeast Asia on the fringes of the Western Pacific” (1989, 55). 9. Although Merrill (1930) argued that this may have occurred as early as the 1520s (and Haddon noted that the Portuguese established their rule in the Moluccas in 1522), for reasons discussed above those dates seem several decades too early. There is also evidence for subsequent input of tobacco to New Guinea from the Philippines and from Java and the Moluccas (Gilmour 1931). 10. “The first significant medium of integration of the whole Pacific Basin was the Manila galleon, an annual voyage linking the Spanish colonies in the Americas with the Philippines, Spain’s only colony in Asia. This voyage continued from the 1580s [actually, from 1573 (Wolf 1982, 153)] right to the early nineteenth century” (Jones, Frost, and White 1993, 57). 11. In reference to the period between 1720 and 1726, Chamorro men and women were forced by the Spanish governor and alcaldes to work two days a week or more, and in compensation for a full day’s work “the villagers were given merely two or three leaves of tobacco grown in the Philippines and priced at double its value” (Hezel and Driver 1988, 147; see also Driver 1992). 12. While negative evidence is not definitive, the English explorer George Anson and his men were on Tinian in the Marianas from August 27 until October 21, 1742, and although Anson describes numerous kinds of plants and animals to be found there he makes no mention whatsoever of tobacco (Walter 1928). 13. “Under a commission from his queen, he voyaged to the New World and sacked Santiago and burned Vigo in 1585 before taking Santo Domingo and Cartagena” (Corn 1999, 104). 14. On this voyage he passed through Micronesia in 1579 where he had a brief encounter with the people of one island (probably Palau; see Lessa 1975). Since tobacco had barely caught on as a recreational drug in England at...