490 COLONIAL HORSES. 



favourite grasses in small tufts, here and there, at com- 

 paratively wide intervals of space. This faculty of 

 selecting proper food on the veldt is undoubtedly the 

 chief cause which made him the best campaigner during 

 the late Boer war. 



The Dutch East India Company appears to have founded 

 the race of Cape horses towards the end of the seventeenth 

 century by the importation of Barbs and Gulf Arabs. 

 Mr. Duncan Hutcheon, who is the Colonial Veterinary 

 Surgeon, tells us in his interesting pamphlet, Military 

 Horses and How to Breed Them, that " in 1792 eight stud- 

 horses were imported from England. They are believed 

 to have been of the early English roadster breed. In the 

 same year, five stud-horses arrived from Boston, and the 

 following year a number of horses and mares were brought 

 from the New England States, and are described as of 

 Spanish or Eastern blood. In addition to these, in March, 

 1807, during the Peninsular War, two French vessels were 

 captured at the Cape, containing some Spanish horses 

 en route to Buenos Ayres for breeding purposes. It is 

 said that from these were obtained the blue and red roans 

 which were considered by the colonists as so valuable 

 for their great power of endurance. ... It was in 

 1813, however, that the dawn of a new era in horse-breeding 

 commenced at the Cape. In that year Lord Charles 

 Somerset was appointed Governor of the colony, and soon 

 after his arrival he directed his attention to the improve- 

 ment of the Cape horse by means of the English thorough- 

 bred, and during his term of office he imj-orted a con- 

 siderable number of first-class thorough-breds, both stallions 

 and mares. During the three following decades, first-class 

 thorough-breds continued to be imported by the leading 

 horse-breeders of the Western Province, and the male 

 progeny of these were distributed all over the colony as 

 stud horses. It was after these importations had im- 

 pressed their character and qualities on the native-bred 

 stock — from 1840 to i860 — that the Cape horse reached 



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