A National Property

Not war alone but commerce also makes strange bedfellows, or at least acquaintances. In demonstration whereof it is appropriate-the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the planting of tobacco in Virginia having been celebrated during i962-to reveal that the sweet-scented variety of that weed served as primum mobile in the bringing together of two diverse personalities. Each is now forgotten by his country. Each probably deserves better. Whether they do or no, what they jointly produced during a few weeks of their busy lives, in a nation alien to both, would appear to stand today as a unique thing and hence deserving of recognition. The production is a detailed account of tobacco culture in Tidewater Virginia from seedtime through storage, composed at London in English, then translated into Polish. The Poles have been puffing tobacco since about i585, when Sultan Murad III of the Ottoman Empire dispatched some dried leaves as a present to King Stephen Bathory. Yet in our time one of the world's most comprehensive codifications of tobacco literature fails to record the existence of a single separate title treating the specific subject of its cultivation in Poland.1 The man who, by translating a stranger's manuscript into his native tongue, increased the sum total of this canon by one was the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James's, Franciszek Bukaty (i747-97). Bukaty (pronounced boo-kot-tee) came to England in I771 to begin his diplomatic career as secretary there to the then Minister Tadeusz Burzyn'ski. In the autumn of I772 he replaced the latter as resident, and in February 1789 was elevated to ministerial rank. He served his monarch well -Stanislas II Poniatowski, last king of Poland-and was well rewarded, if not by an impressive salary at least by investiture with such honors as the Orders of Saint Stanislas and of the White Eagle. For the King esteemed this industrious, cultured representative of the minor gentry who spoke his

Epistemology · Law and economics · Political science · Property (philosophy) · Sociology · American History and Culture · Central European Literary Studies · Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland · History · Philosophy