Jacques Carter was the first European to taste tobacco in America. He compared it to pepper in sensation, which in fact belongs to the same family as tobacco. But Christopher Columbus was probably the first European to see someone smoking. These were the local Native Americans, who smoked tobacco in doses vastly greater than those of modern cigarettes. It put them into a trance-like state, and was used for this purpose by witch doctors in particular. Columbus, however, never described this experience. And it was Amerigo Vespucci who first described tobacco smoking by Native Americans in 1505.
