Perhaps the most likely scene of Raleigh’s first experiments in the art of smoking was Durham House, which stood where the Adelphi Terrace and the streets between it and the Strand now stand.  This was in the occupation of Sir Walter for twenty years (1583-1603), and he was probably resident there when Hariot returned from Virginia to make his report and instruct his employer in the management of a pipe.  Walter Thornbury, in his “Haunted London,” referring to the story of the servant throwing the ale over his smoking master, says:  “There is a doubtful old legend about Raleigh’s first pipe, the scene of which may be not unfairly laid at Durham House, where Raleigh lived.”  The ale story is mythical, but it is highly probable that Sir Walter’s first pipes were smoked in Durham House.  Dr. Brushfield quotes Hepworth Dixon, in “Her Majesty’s Tower,” as drawing “an imaginary and yet probable picture of him and his companions at a window of this very house, overlooking the ‘silent highway’: 

“’It requires no effort of the fancy to picture these three men [Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh] as lounging in a window of Durham House, puffing the new Indian weed from silver bowls, discussing the highest themes in poetry and science, while gazing on the flower-beds and the river, the darting barges of dame and cavalier, and the distant pavilions of Paris garden and the Globe.’” This is a pure “effort of the fancy” so far as Bacon and Shakespeare are concerned.  Shakespeare’s absolute silence about tobacco forbids us to assume that he smoked; but of Raleigh the picture may be true enough.  The house had, as Aubrey tells us, “a little turret that looked into and over the Thames, and had the prospect which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world”; and it would be strange indeed if the owner of the noble house did not often smoke a contemplative pipe in the window of that pleasant turret.

The only mention made of tobacco by Raleigh himself occurs in a testamentary note made a little while before his execution in 1618.  Referring to the tobacco remaining on his ship after his last voyage, he wrote:  “Sir Lewis Stukely sold all the tobacco at Plimouth of which, for the most part of it, I gave him a fift part of it, as also a role for my Lord Admirall and a role for himself ...  I desire that hee may give his account for the tobacco.”  As showing how closely Sir Walter’s name was associated with it long after his death, Dr. Brushfield quotes the following entry from the diary of the great Earl of Cork:  “Sept. 1, 1641.  Sent by Travers to my infirme cozen Roger Vaghan, a pott of Sir Walter Raleighes tobackoe.”