900 Deane Phillips 



saddle purposes also by the sugar planters, who were willing to pay 

 high prices for superior animals of this type. 



That the New England colonies, rather than any of the other con- 

 tinental settlements, should have become the accepted source of supply 

 for this demand from the sugar islands, resulted chiefly from the fact 

 that they were the only ones which possessed a surplus of horses at the 

 time when the demand first began to make itself felt, about the middle 

 of the seventeenth century. In most of the other colonies there was an 

 actual scarcity of horses, as in Virginia (64). The Dutch in New 

 Netherlands, it is true, did actually export some horses during the year 

 1650, but an act was soon passed which forbade such shipments (65). 

 It thus came about that in the early days of the sugar industry in 

 the West Indies, New England had no real competitor among the con- 

 tinental colonies in supplying the growing demand for horses for the 

 sugar plantations. Virginia furnished many cattle (Q6) , and after 

 1700 the colony on the Hudson River, by that time in English hands,- 

 again began the shipment of horses; but New England's leadership 

 in the trade was never seriously threatened during the colonial period. 



The continental American colonies proved to be a convenient source 

 of supply to the sugar islands of the West Indies, not only for horses 

 and cattle but for many other commodities as well. The trade in 

 horses, in short, was an integral part of the much more extensive com- 

 merce which grew up between the West Indies and the northern British 

 colonies whereby the islands were supplied with timber, boards, staves, 

 fish, and provisions of all sorts, in return for sugar, molasses, rum, dye- 

 stuffs, and, most desirable of all, Spanish dollars and bills of exchange 

 on London. The extent of the export trade in horses at any particular 

 period, therefore, was infiuenced by the condition of this commerce as 

 a whole and by the changes that took place in the sugar industry itself. 

 Wars, acts of Parliament, competition between the Islands — in short, 

 all factors that aided, hindered, or changed the direction of this larger 

 trade — had their effect on the exportation of horses. Certain changes 

 in the manufacture of sugar which took place during the first part of 

 the eighteenth century also tended to decrease the demand for horses. 

 Since, therefore, the horse raising that developed in New England 

 during the later part of the colonial period was essentially dependent on 



