Another Elizabethan who is often said to have smoked the first pipe in England is Ralph Lane, the first Governor of Virginia, who came home with Drake in 1586.  Lane is said to have given Sir Walter Raleigh an Indian pipe and to have shown him how to use it.  There is no original authority, however, for the statement that Lane first smoked tobacco in England, and, moreover, he was not the first English visitor to Virginia to return to this country.  One Captain Philip Amadas accompanied Captain Barlow, who commanded on the occasion of Raleigh’s first voyage of discovery, when the country was formally taken possession of and named Virginia in honour of Queen Elizabeth.  This was early in 1584.  The two captains reached England in September 1584, bringing with them the natives of whom King James I, in his “Counter-blaste to Tobacco,” speaks as “some two or three Savage men,” who “were brought in, together with this Savage custome,” i.e. of smoking.  It is extremely improbable that Captains Amadas and Barlow, when reporting to Raleigh on their expedition, did not also make him acquainted with the Indian practice of smoking.  This would be two years before the return of Ralph Lane.

But certainly pipes were smoked in England before 1584.  The plant was introduced into Europe, as we have seen, about 1560, and it was under cultivation in England by 1570.  In the 1631 edition of Stow’s “Chronicles” it is stated that tobacco was “first brought and made known by Sir John Hawkins, about the year 1565, but not used by Englishmen in many years after.”  There is only one reference to tobacco in Hawkins’s description of his travels.  In the account of his second voyage (1564-65) he says:  “The Floridians when they travel have a kinde of herbe dryed, which with a cane, and an earthen cup in the end, with fire, and the dried herbs put together do smoke thoro the cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live foure or five days without meat or drinke.”  Smoking was thus certainly known to Hawkins in 1565, but much reliance cannot be placed on the statement in the Stow of 1631 that he first made known the practice in this country, because that statement appears in no earlier edition of the “Chronicles.”  Moreover, as opposed to the allegation that tobacco was “not used by Englishmen in many years after” 1565, there is the remark by William Harrison, in his “Chronologie,” 1588, that in 1573 “the taking in of the smoke of the Indian herbe called Tobacco, by an instrument formed like a little ladell, whereby it passeth from the mouth into the head and stomach, is gretlie taken up and used in England.”  The “little ladell” describes the early form of the tobacco-pipe, with small and very shallow bowl.

King James, in his reference to the “first Author” of what he calls “this abuse,” clearly had Sir Walter Raleigh in view, and it is Raleigh with whom in the popular mind the first pipe of tobacco smoked in England is usually associated.  The tradition is crystallized in the story of the schoolboy who, being asked “What do you know about Sir Walter Raleigh?” replied:  “Sir Walter Raleigh introduced tobacco into England, and when smoking it in this country said to his servant, ’Master Ridley, we are to-day lighting a candle in England which by God’s blessing will never be put out’”!