Book Review: King of the Wind

Title: King of the Wind

Author: Marguerite Henry

Date: 1948

Publisher: Rand McNally

ISBN: 0-590-45316-5 (Scholastic paperback)

Length: 192 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Wesley Dennis

Quote: “[S]elect six of the most perfect steeds in the royal stables. They will be a gift to His Majesty, Louis XV, the boy King of France.”

There’s just one problem with using the history of the horse known as Godolphin Arabian, or Godolphin Barb, as an inspirational animal story for children: It’s an adult story. To make a novel for children out of it Marguerite Henry had not only to invent a little boy who not only lives with a disability but never seems to grow up or change his clothes, but also to alter the pivotal moment in the horse’s own life in such a way that the inspirational consequences have to be narrated thirdhand.

The broad outline of the story needed no changing, just a little fictional embroidery. History records that in the eighteenth century Sultan Mulai Ismael of Morocco sent six fine Arabian race horses to France for racing and crossbreeding. At the time Europeans were trying to breed fast race horses, but the fashion was for breeding big, heavy, thickset animals (of all species, actually). The preferred types of horses were the ancestors of today's Clydesdales and Percherons. Beside them even healthy, well fed Arabian horses looked small and thin. And these horses, apparently, weren’t well fed when they got to France. Apparently a greedy ship’s captain had supplied scant and poor food for the six horses and the six stable boys who travelled with them. When they got to France the boy king’s many aristocrat advisers sent five horses and boys directly back to Morocco. The palace cook being between horses, one of the bony Arabian stallions was harnessed to the cook’s shopping wagon.

Unaltered male horses aren’t the easiest to handle. Why the cook sold the Arabian horse to a vendor of firewood rather than having him neutered is one of the unanswered questions of history. Anyway, during the tough little horse’s first winter in France, an English visitor found him fallen down on the ice, being beaten by the vendor. The Englishman bought the horse, brought him back to England, and sold him. To the Earl of Godolphin, who wanted to breed race horses. The Earl did not, however, want to breed fine-boned, long-necked Arabian horses. He bought this horse as what horse breeders call a “teaser.”

Horses mate only once a year, and their preferences about exactly when and with whom they will share this moment often conflict with those of humans. The Earl, it seems, had particular problems getting visiting mares interested in his big fat male horse, and had noticed that they seemed to find the Arabian stallion more interesting. So the job of the stable boy, who history records was still travelling with the horse, was to lead the Arabian horse out to greet visiting mares before the mares were led in to mate with the Earl’s stallions.

“Stud farms” are not as idyllic as non-horsey men fantasize that they would be. Unaltered male horses do not have a natural instinct to graze peaceably in herds like cows. Nor do horses pair off and live in human-type families. Male horses fight, sometimes to the death, to select one leader who is then allowed to mate with all the females who form his herd. Young horses follow their mothers about until they reach adolescence, when the males start fighting. Most males will try to go their own way and perhaps start their own herds, if they can. But on stud farms there’s no place for them to go, so all these male horses spend their days indoors. Their instincts give them a tendency to be hostile and dangerous at best. Since their situations are not the best, from their point of view, the expectation is that they’ll become vicious, and can be handled only by teams of professionals using various restraining devices, sometimes including drugs. Nobody expects a male horse who is kept specifically for breeding purposes to be pleasant to have around. A male horse who is free to roam a pasture with a mini-herd of female and/or neutered horses and other animals is nearly always easier for everyone, including himself, to live with, and may even make himself useful, if only to one particular human friend.

The Godolphin Arabian had such a friend in the stable boy who came with him from Morocco. Who this man was, where he came from, whether he was completely unable to speak or just never learned to speak English, have been lost to history. The Earl called him Agba. Both horse and man were young when they came to England; they grew up, and the horse grew old, on the Godolphin farm.

The adolescent horse was led out to meet several females who were then bred with the Earl’s male horses before, as young male horses used as “teasers” will, he realized he was old enough to mate, too. Probably with the connivance of his human friend, he “broke loose” from the team of men who were supposed to control the male horses. He whipped the bigger, lazier, older horse in a fair fight and, as male horses do after winning a fight, mated with the female “before his handler could stop him.” The Earl was not pleased.

But he kept the mare and her colt, along with the other colts his horses had produced, and he soon saw that the lean and wiry Arabian-British crossbreed colt was faster than any of his purebred British colts. Or, it turned out, than anybody else’s. The Godolphin Arabian’s first two colts were called Lath, meaning a thin bit of wood shaved off on a lathe, and Cade, meaning the smallest young animal in a litter—and they won races under those names. The Godolphin Arabian’s third colt was called Regulus, because he was expected to win races regularly, and he did. These and the Godolphin Arabian’s other crossbreed offspring became the founders of the Thoroughbred breed. Two other male Arabian horses were imported to England. Before long, one-mile races were restricted to Thoroughbreds—descendants of these three stallions, whose offspring were then bred with one another. On one side or another the Godolphin Arabian was an ancestor to almost every horse whose name you’ve seen in the newspapers: Man o’ War, Black Gold, Native Dancer, Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Seabiscuit, Barbaro, Smarty Jones...

Horsey adults have long enjoyed the ironic history of the first Thoroughbred horses, but it’s hardly an edifying story for middle school readers. Making it one remained for Marguerite Henry to do. She did this by telling the story from the point of view of Agba, about whom the real world knows nothing, which left Henry free to invent an inspirational little story based on what really happened to children whose parents had died young and poor in the eighteenth century. Agba is taught nothing but how to groom horses. We learn with him about the body proportions required for show-quality Arabians, but mostly we see him being loyal to his horse.

In the children’s story version, the horse just eats, rests, or runs about, often carrying Agba and their pet cat, in between intervals of starvation, until he falls in love with the Earl’s youngest mare. The urge to inject an “affectional” quality to animal sexuality rings about as false as Agba’s reaction when he and the horse and the cat are banished from the stables to an isolated property down in the Fens, then brought back when the Earl sees how Lath can run. At Wicken Fen he sees only one other human being, a poacher; free to farm or fish, he doesn’t learn how to do either, but subsists on barley cooked in brackish polluted water. We can believe he might have been shy enoough to feel not much more isolated during this time than he is by his muteness all the time, but I suspect a real man would think of better rations at the Earl’s farm, new clothes, and presumably a little pocket money, before thinking about the horse’s reputation. Well, read the book. Maybe, if you’re as goodhearted as Agba, and a horse is what you have to love, you might think of the horse’s reputation first. I’ve never been sure.

Henry also gave the horse an Arabic name: one of the simplest sords in the language, Sham, “sun,” although the horse’s coat was usually described as the shade of brown called “bay.” Though, if the stable boy really couldn’t speak at all, the horse would never have answered to that name either, many Thoroughbreds don’t know their official registered names. Stable staff often give them simpler, more descriptive nicknames, often things like “Horse” or “Big Boy.” Man o’ War, the newspapers reported, actually answered to “Big Red.” The Godolphin Arabian might have had a grandiose official name like "King of the Wind," and "daughters of the wind" is a traditional name for Arabian mares, but whether the horse had a name will never be known. To the Earl his being an "Arabian" or "Barb" was distinctive enough.

In any case, most children who like horse stories like Marguerite Henry’s. Though what I currently have for resale is a reprint with only a few of the original illustrations, I recommend looking for the original if you can find it. Most of the illustrations in children’s books are badly done, included just to distract the eye, but Wesley Dennis’s horse and dog drawings are lifelike. Children who consciously study how to draw and paint animal pictures, with or without humans and landscapes in them, will want to study all of his. If you grew up with a copy of King of the Wind that had the full-page color pictures in it, a reprint with only the little black-and-white pictures above the chapter headings seems unsatisfactory somehow.