Note Back to Main Text — Chapter II
Reading edition
Oviedo[4] is the first author who gives a clear account of smoking among the Indians of Hispaniola[5]. He alludes to it as one of their evil customs and used by them to produce insensibility. Their mode of using it was by inhalation and expelling the smoke through the nostrils by means of a hollow forked cane or hollow reed. Oviedo describes them as