Pr Parer Voyage Cuba

On This Day in History: July 27 We've Come a Long Way, Baby

On his 1496 voyage to the Indies, Romano Pane, a monk, accompanied Columbus. He told of a leafy vegetable that was dried and put in a pipe shaped like a slingshot called a “tabaco.” The Indians then inserted two ends of the pipe in their nostrils, lit the leaf and inhaled. He said that exhaling made the smokers look like small dragons.

When Columbus landed on San Salvador, several Arawak Indians gave him some of the leaves as a gift. The following month, when he sailed to Cuba, two of his officers went ashore and observed “many people who were going to their villages, women and men, with a firebrand in hand, and herbs to drink and smoke thereof.”

The leaf could also be chewed or rolled in the shape of a candle and smoked, but this could make one light-headed if used too much. The Indians used it in many of their ceremonies and venerated it because they believed it had health-giving properties.

As to who first brought tobacco to Europe, there is dispute. Andre Thevet, a Franciscan, claimed he brought tobacco seeds back from a trip to Brazil in 1555. Jean Nicot, French Ambassador to Portugal, denied this and said he was given seeds by a New World sailor. After one of Nicot’s servants claimed that an ulcer he had was cured by a tobacco poultice, Nicot sent some seeds to the Queen of France. Many European noblemen then claimed it as a cure for everything from the pox to dental problems. The active ingredient in tobacco was named nicotine in honor of Nicot.

John Hawkins, slave trader and privateer, claimed he introduced tobacco to Britain from America in 1565 when he brought a shipload back with him from Florida.

Complaints were being voiced against smoking early on. In 1604 King James I called the habit “vile and stinking.” Apparently his complaints went unheeded as Sir Walter Raleigh had popularized the public’s penchant for the “weed.” Captain John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 decided that the colony needed a cash crop to survive. Tobacco had been grown there since 1612.

American sets off on record 103-mile Cuba to Florida swim ...

American sets off on record 103-mile Cuba to Florida swim

Weather forecasters had predicted doldrum-like conditions until Thursday in the straits that separate the United States and Cuba, giving her a good window for the grueling voyage.

Nyad tried the crossing from Cuba in 1978 when she was 28, but failed in the face of winds and heavy waves.

The same swim was finished successfully by Australian Susan Maroney in May 1997. But Nyad’s claim to a world record will be that, unlike Maroney, she is doing it without a shark cage in the strait’s warm, shark-infested waters.

Instead of a cage, Nyad will be protected by a surrounding electrical field and by divers who will watch for sharks and drive them away if they get too close.

Maroney was only 22, but Nyad stated her comparatively advanced age is one of the reasons she will try the swim. She hopes the swim will help people her age and older realize they still can accomplish many things.

She retired from swimming more than 30 years ago, but still has the muscled body and broad shoulders of a marathon swimmer.

In her heyday, she set several world records, including swimming around Manhattan in 1975 in less than eight hours and a 102.5 mile swim from Bimini to Florida in 1979.

Weekly statistical sugar trade journal

Rear-Admirals Schley, Sampson and Cervera, a review of the naval campaign of 1898

Cuba

Cuba

The principal navigations, voyages, traffiques, and discoveries of the English nation