Horses in History
The Horses of the Conquest. By R. B. Cunninghame Graham. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) 11.-N such curiosities of history as " Uncle Sam's Camels" bad found a place in English literature, the horses which played an infinitely greater part in the development of the New World could not be much longer forgotten. That they were ignored so long may now be taken as cause for con- gratulation, since in Mr. Cunninghame Graham they have found an ideal chronicler, loving horses, as skilled in describing what he loves as what he hates, and steeped in the lore of the Conquistadores. Modestly, he calls himself " a com- mentator upon the writings of those who with a simplicity, good faith, and a command of vigorous Castilian that has never been excelled, dismounted and sat down to write over the camp fire the adventures of the day." Admirers of his Paez and Valdivia will not need to be told that here is more than comment.
Mr. Cunninghame Graham's story begins fittingly with the Conquistador's thanksgiving " After God we owed the victory to our horses." But should a horse remind him of some magnificent exploit of Cortes, of Gomel° Silvestre's ride—" I galloped, Direk galloped " seems but tawdry stuff beside it—or of the hardships De Soto suffered in Florida, he is fain to turn aside on to this new trail and soon to leave horses far behind. Whether the trail be new or old, of the first conquerors or of the modern Gaucho, is of no moment so it be picturesque. And so this doxology of horses becomes a picture of the New World, as the conquerors found it and as it remains to-day. It is not history as universities know history. Nor is it, strictly, history at all. That term implies sequence in events, if not always in cause and effect. But from the mingling of personal reminiscence, reflection, and liberal quotation from the historians of the Conquest, there grows a sense of the importance of the horse in this chapter of human history which the orthodox historian could not have bettered.
The Indians whom Cortes first encountered believed horse and rider to be one, and thought the sound of musket firing to be this strange beast's bellowing. Even when the separate existence of the horse had become patent, something of the first fear remained. El Morrill°, the favourite black horse of Cortes, fell ill near Lake Peten Itza, and was left to the care of the Indians. When he died his keepers, fearing the wrath of a Conquistador, made of him a graven image, which was placed in a temple on one of the islands of the lake. And soon, in the words of Villagutierre, " the abomin- able image became the chiefest of their gods, though they had many others, equally horrible." His fate may be the better appreciated when compared with that of El Jalequillo, a man in Cortes's army of whom Bernal Diaz tells us simply that " the Indians ate him." This one deification was a Mall reward for much martyrdom. Horses in the campaigns suffered as much as men, though, " both horses and negro slaves being few and dear," fewer died. Fed on maize instead of their accustomed barley they were ridden as much as twenty-five leagues at a time—" and still," as the Spaniards say. They were driven through swamps in which they sank up to the neck. They sweated in the noonday sun of Yucatan and shivered in the cold north wind of Florida. Like their riders they went often without sleep, and when tired were set, " for sport," to hunt deer. But their backs were stout and strong, as befitted beasts which had to carry men in armour or in the monstrous quilts with which the invaders protected themselves from mail-piercing arrows. They had not the beauty of their modern descendants in Europe. But in its stead they had a sturdiness and endurance of inestimable worth to pioneers.
Of the part the horse played in the opening up of the Continent—to all but, the inveterate romantic the greatest romance of all—Mr. Cunninghame Graham might have said more. The greatest number of horses taken from Spain by any expedition to the Americas was threo hundred. But they were early acclimatized in the Indies, and when the Conquest was over, horses, like Conquistadores, were settled on the land. No country in the world has proved more favourable to their development. They thrived and multi- plied until to-day, from California down to Sandy Point, there are innumerable horses whose community of type proclaims their common origin. Don Felix de Azara, writing at the beginning of last century, noted that " the poorest Gaucho owns two horses." It is not so now in the north, and in the south only doubtfully so outside Argentina. For one thing, prairie and pampa are alike giving way to urban civilization. For another, motor-car and railway are quicker. Cortes and his horses, repairing the mistakes of a Nature which allowed the early American horse to die out, may. themselves and their descendants, before long be an episode in history. And as the features of some Indian civilizations are now being preserved in story almost at the moment when those civilizations disappear, so is it well that the deeds of the American horse should be recorded now while he is still of use to mankind.
Among the three men who have told us most of the horses of the Conquest—Cortes himself, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega—Bernal Diaz alone writes of them as comrades and friends. With him his biographer is one in spirit. He may be tolerant of faith only for its beauty, indifferent to our rules of life, even more indifferent to our rules of grammar. But where men leave him sceptical and disillusioned, horses excite only his admiration, of which he has here set down a worthy record.
W. H. HINDLE.
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