After an absence of three days, the two men whom Columbus had sent to explore returned. They had found no king nor large city, but had come upon many small hamlets with numberless inhabitants; yet nothing could be seen that in any way corresponded to their ideas of settled government. On their way back they for the first time witnessed the use of a herb which, says Washington Irving, ‘the ingenious caprice of man has since converted into an universal luxury in defiance of the opposition of the senses.’ Among other tales, strange and wonderful, the two men told how they had come upon naked Indians with lighted fire-brands in their mouths, from which they drew in the fumes, expelling them again through their nostrils! They were simple, inoffensive people, and well disposed towards the white men, whom they allowed to examine their fire-brands. They had found them to be composed of the dried leaves of a herb rolled up tightly in a leaf of maize. Lighting one end of the roll, they put the other end between their teeth, and inhaled the fragrant vapour with an air of placid enjoyment which seems to have produced in the Spaniards a craving for the weed that to this day has never left them. Here was a race of beings living in happy ignorance of the strifes and ambitions, the anxieties and vexations of civilised man, reclining in every posture of ease while breathing the fragrant odours of their treasured weed: civilised man, indeed, gazed with amazement and longing. Sweeter far than incense from Arabi was this new delight to the Spaniards, it became a necessity; it was their morning comforter that fortified them for the combat of the day, and their evening solace. Thus it happened that the new world gave to the old its first lesson in the art of regaling tired nature with her own anodyne. Navarrete says: ‘The habit has since become universal, and hence the origin of the so much prized and so far celebrated havanas.’