270 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



to be instances of reversion to the ancestral type are nothing of 

 the kind, but only the continuance of characteristics brought 

 by the ancestors of such horses from Spain to Hispaniola, and 

 Cuba, and thence into Mexico. 



It is absolutely certain that the horses of the northern parts 

 of South America, to which we have already referred (p. 266), 

 are descended from animals first brought to those regions by 

 the Spanish colonists. That such was the case not only with 

 the Isthmus of Darien, and the adjacent regions, but also with 

 Peru, is beyond doubt. Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the 

 kingdom of the Incas, was already in Hispaniola in 1510, for 

 in that year he took part in an unfortunate attempt to plant 

 a colony at Uraba on Terra Firma. In the following year he was 

 at Darien with the famous Vasco Nunez de Balboa, and accom- 

 panied that bold cavalier when he scaled the mountain ridge of 

 the Isthmus and was the first European to gaze on the limitless 

 expanse of the Pacific. After the gallant Balboa had been put 

 to death by his rival Pedrarias, Pizarro attached himself to the 

 latter, who with a view to pushing forward the discovery of 

 new lands for plunder on the w^estern coast, transferred the 

 capital of the colony from Darien to Panama in 1519, at 

 the very time that Cortes had set forth to subdue the Aztec 

 empire. Pizarro started on his first expedition southwards 

 from Panama in 1524 with about one hundred men in two 

 small vessels, but he does not appear to have had any horses. 

 However, in his second attempt to reach the realms of gold, in 

 addition to one hundred and sixty men he had been able to 

 procure a few horses at Panama \ There can be no reasonable 

 doubt that these horses, like those brought by Cortes to Mexico, 

 had come from Hispaniola or Cuba, and were of the same kind. 

 The important aid rendered to Pizarro by these horses in his 

 wars with the Indians is probably familiar to most readers, for 

 the natives at first supposed that the Spanish cavaliers were a 

 kind of centaurs, and Pizarro was able to extricate his forces 

 from one dangerous position by the consternation that seized 

 the Indians when a cavalier fell from his horse, as they were 



1 W. H. Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. i. p. 240. 



