FOUR FOUNDING STRAINS

SURINAM SUGAR MILL 1722

This engraving of a Surinam sugar mill reproduced in the 1722 edition of JeanBaptist Labat’s Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amerique was actually drawn 50 years earlier. It shows the earliest design for the sugar mills used in Surinam and throughout the Caribbean. Slaves wielding sticks drove teams of horses to turn the vertical steel rollers. The wooden trough beneath collected the juice, which was then taken to the boiling house where it was reduced to a thick slurry. This in turn was sun-dried and then bagged for export.

Today horses of Narragansett Pacer ancestry are found in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Colombia. Because the Caribbean islands had been colonized during the 16th century by the Spanish, the foundation for these herds was Spanish “Andaluce–o.” But in the 17th and 18th centuries, when sugar plantations dominated the economy, much Hobby blood was imported. Today, horses with this mixed ancestry form feral herds in mountainous regions of Puerto Rico and are found in Cuba. This photo offers an excellent idea of the type of horse imported to Rhode Island by Thomas Hazard in the mid-17th century to improve his breed. CUBAN PETIZO they were killed and eaten during the “starving time” that crippled the colony during the severe winter of 1609 to 1610. We know that the number could not have been less than seven, because archaeologists have recovered seven horse skeletons dating to this time from the Jamestown Colony site.

Historian Deane Phillips notes that these few references probably represent only the tip of the iceberg. “Other shipments probably went unrecorded,” he states, “and therefore the scantiness of the record does not necessarily mean that horses were not being brought into the country in considerable quantities. That they were being imported in large numbers is, in fact, the only possible conclusion to be drawn in view of their great abundance a few years later.”

All the riding horse breeds with roots in the original 13 Colonies--including the Morgan, American Standardbred, American Saddlebred, Tennessee Walking Horse and the American Quarter Horse---descend from four strains first imported from Europe during the 17th century. These were the English-Irish Hobby, the BretonCanadian, the Scottish Garron and the Dutch (Flemish) “Hartdraaver” (see “Four Founding Strains,” page 60).

Of the four, the most numerous and influential was the Hobby. By analogy to cookery, we can say that the substance of the “American horse stew” was the Hobby---which supplied most of the mare bloodlines for all the riding breeds---while the Canadian, Scottish and Dutch strains formed the “seasoning,” which added certain distinctive characteristics. Only after the end of the Revolutionary War did the English