900 DEANE PHILIPS 
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 wher ‘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 (66), 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 influenced 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 
