166 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



that these observations were made nearly four hundred years ago, 

 and that i:he surprise of the Italian was not at merely seeing a 

 few pacers which he had never seen in his own country, but that 

 "the great company" of English horses were pacers. As I have 

 here given an instance showing the surprise of an Italian at find- 

 ing pacers, I will follow it with another showing the surprise of 

 an Englishman at not finding any pacers. The chaplain of the- 

 Earl of Cumberland, on his several voyages of discovery in South 

 America and the West India Islands, about 1596, made elaborate 

 note of what he saw and learned of the new countries which the 

 English then visited for the first time. These notes passed into the 

 hands of that wonderfully prolific writer, or rather compiler, 

 Samuel Purchas, from whose fourth volume, page 1171, the fol- 

 lowing paragraph is taken: 



" And I wot not bow that kind of beast [speaking of cattle] bath specially 

 a liking to tbese Southerly parts of the world above their horses, none of which 

 I have seen by much so tall and goodly as ordinarily they are in England; they 

 were well made and well mettled, and good store there are of them, but me- 

 thinks there are many things wanting in them which are ordinary in our Eng- 

 lish light horses. They are all trotters, nor do I remember that I have seen 

 above one ambler, and that was a little riddling nag. But it may be if there 

 were better breeders they would have better and more useful increase, yet they 

 are good enough for hackneys, to which use only almost they are employed." 



The surprise of the Englishman at finding no pacers in South 

 America seems to have been as great as that of the Italian at 

 finding so many of them in England, one hundred years earlier. 

 These horses were strictly Spanish, and probably were descended 

 from those brought from Palos in 1493 by Columbus, the first 

 horses that ever crossed the Atlantic. The ''one little fiddling 

 nag" that showed some kind of a pacing gait may have been of 

 English blood and captured from some English expedition, sev- 

 eral of which were unfortunate; or his failure to trot may have 

 been the result of an injury. It should not be forgotten that in 

 that period every sea captain was out for what he could capture, 

 and this was especially the case as between the English and the 

 Spanish. These are the outlines of the principal points of evi- 

 dence that the pacing habit of action came from the North and 

 riot from the South. That there were pacers in both Greece and 

 Rome before the Christian era, and perhaps later, there can be no- 

 doubt, for they were both overrun and devastated again and 

 again by the hordes of Northern Barbarians, bringing their flocks-, 



