Sir Thomas Herriot

‪The 27th of July 1586 is the date given for the arrival of tobacco in England, brought, it is said, by Sir Walter Raleigh from Virginia. Indeed, one legend tells of how Sir Walter’s servant, seeing him smoking a pipe for the first time, threw water over him, for fear that he was on fire. Raleigh is also credited as being responsible for our love of that round brown vegetable that we just love to chip, boil, roast, and mash - the potato.
. 
However, it is one Thomas Harriot, and not Raleigh who should get the credit.

On the 28th of July 1586, Sir Thomas Harriot disembarked from a ship in Plymouth harbour with a number of bags of potatoes, returning from Raleigh’s English colony on Roanoke Island, which today we know as North Carolina, where he had been studying wildlife. 

Of this vegetable he would later write his "A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia" and in it would describe the potato as

              “Openavk are kind of roots of round forme, some of the bignes of walnuts, some far greater, which are found in
          moist & marish grounds growing many together one by another in ropes, or as thogh they were a string. Being boiled or
                                                                      sodden they are very good meate.”

Harriot, who was born in Northumberland in 1564, was employed by Raleigh as his maths teacher, he was also friends with Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, however, Raleigh's execution and Percy's connections with the Gunpowder Plotters saw his funding end, it was then he took up astronomy. This in turn led to him being credited as the first person to draw the moon, over four months before Galileo put ink to paper.