W.A. Penn’s 1901 The Soverane Herbe is a history of tobacco. Penn wrote, “Since Fairholt’s ‘Tobacco,’ published in 1859, this is the first attempt to chronicle the career of ‘the plant of wondrous feature’ in a manner befitting the subject.”1

Title page of The Soverane Herbe

The Soverane Herbe starts out by discussing the spiritual nature of tobacco smoke: it was used as “an expression of man’s homage to the Great Spirit.”2 Early travelers to the Americas noted the spiritual and ritual uses of tobacco at the time. Eventually, tobacco use moved from the religious to the medicinal and also to the pleasurable. Penn relates a tobacco origin story:

“Believing that the great spirit smoked tobacco, the herb was deemed sacred, and its use a laudable, if not a religious, practice. According to the legend of the Susquehannah Indians, in the beginning they had only the flesh of animals to eat, failing which they starved. One day, so ran the story, two hunters were broiling part of a deer they had just killed, when they saw a maiden of surpassing beauty descend from the sky and seat herself on a hill close by. Presuming that she was a goddess who had smelt their venison, they offered her their greatest delicacy, the tongue of the deer. She accepted the dainty, and being pleased therewith, promised to reward their kindness, telling them to return to the place after thirteen moons. After a year the hunters returned and found maize growing where the goddess’s right hand had touched the hill, kidney beans where her left hand had rested, and tobacco where she had sat.”3

Penn relates the story of tobacco’s spread across Europe, noting there were cultural forces that pushed it along as well as medical claims that made it spread like wildfire – it was thought to cure just about every illness that existed!

As tobacco spread, there was backlash against it. Its use was prohibited in many places throughout the 1600s, with dire consequences for smokers:

  • In Russia, smokers would be whipped for the first offense and executed for the second
  • In Turkey, smokers had tobacco pipes driven through their cheeks and were driven through the streets backward on donkeys to their executions
  • In Persia, a merchant was burned alive in his tobacco
  • And many more!

Of course, tobacco became more and more popular despite these restrictions.

Penn goes through the cultivation and manufacture of tobacco and discusses pipes, then comes to cigars.

He writes, “The original cigar consisted of tobacco leaves enclosed in a maize leaf.”4 Of watching cigars being made in Cuba, he writes, “Watching the torcedor rolling out cigars with unerring fingers, one is convinced of the fact that the process is not one of skill, but art magic – a piece of magnificent jugglery.”5 Penn praises Cuban cigars significantly throughout his chapter on cigars. He particularly disliked European cigars: “European cigars are not to be commended. German cigars are always bad, and can be recognised by their uniform thickness and rotundity. The Italian sigarro is incredibly vile. The manufacture and sale of tobacco is there, as also in France, Austria, and Spain, a government monopoly. Cigars are served out in the Italian army as part of the daily rations. Bad as are the cigars sold to the public by the Regie, the military ones are worse. Some years ago they were found to consist of a piece of lime, powdered gypsum, a quantity of earth, a splinter of wood, and a length of string.”6 Penn gives interesting information in his Cigar chapter about how to tell the quality of cigars.

At the time of writing, Penn said that about 200 million cigars were smoked annually in England.

He also reviews the literature of tobacco, sharing his opinion that “the literature of tobacco is exceeded in quantity only by its inferiority of quality. The hundreds of volumes in all languages which tobacco has called forth form, with scarcely an exception, wearisome and tedious reading, whether the subject is approached from a medical, moral, poetic, social, or rational standpoint.”7 Despite his objections to most tobacco literature, Penn’s survey of it in his chapter is pretty reasonable.

All in all, The Soverane Herbe is a good survey of the history, spread, uses, social customs, forms, literature, and opinions on tobacco and those who use it. Penn is a writer worth reading; it’s an entertaining book in addition to being informative.

The Soverane Herbe is in the public domain and can be read for free on Google Books.

  1. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pg. vi [↩]
  2. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pg. 2 [↩]
  3. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pg. 11 [↩]
  4. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pg. 180 [↩]
  5. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pg. 185 [↩]
  6. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pg. 190 [↩]
  7. W.A. Penn, The Soverane Herbe, 1901, pgs. 217-218 [↩]