While the presence, and use of tobacco by the natives of America are among the most interesting features connected with its history, it can hardly be more so than is its early cultivation by the Spaniards, English and Dutch, and afterward by the French. The cultivation of the plant began in the West India Islands and South America early in the Sixteenth Century. In Cuba its culture commenced in 1580, and from this and the other islands large quantities were shipped to Europe. It was also cultivated near Varina in Columbia, while Amazonian tobacco had acquired an enviable reputation as well as Varinian, long before its cultivation began in Virginia by the English. At this period of its culture in America the entire product was sent to Spain and Portugal, and from thence to France and Great Britain and other countries of Europe. The plant and its use attracted at once the attention as well as aroused the cupidity of the Spaniards, who prized it as one of their greatest discoveries. As soon as Tobacco was introduced into Europe by the Spaniards, and its use became a general custom, its sale increased as extensively as its cultivation. At this period it brought enormous prices, the finest selling at from fifteen to eighteen shillings per pound. Its cultivation by the Spaniards in various portions of the New World proved to them not only its real value as an article of commerce, but also that several varieties of the plant existed; as on removal from one island or province to another it changed in size and quality of leaf. Varinas tobacco at this time was one of the finest tobaccos known,[10] and large quantities were shipped to Spain and Portugal. The early voyagers little dreamed, however, of the vast proportions to be assumed by the trade in the plant which they had discovered, and which in time proved a source of the greatest profit not only to the European colonies, but to the dealers in the Old World. [Footnote 10: Trinidad tobacco was then considered the finest.] Helps, treating on this same subject, says: "It is interesting to observe the way in which a new product is introduced to the notice of the Old World--a product that was hereafter to become, not only an unfailing source of pleasure to a large section of the whole part of mankind, from the highest to the lowest, but was also to distinguish itself as one of those commodities for revenue, which are the delight of statesmen, the great financial resource of modern nations, and which afford a means of indirect taxation that has perhaps nourished many a war, and prevented many a revolution. The importance, financially and commercially speaking, of this discovery of tobacco--a discovery which in the end proved more productive to the Spanish crown than that of the gold mines of the Indies."