Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/478498
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 3 5 T he sun never sets on the British Empire, it was often said in the early 1900s, to which might have been added "nor on its brown trout." English gentlemen and a few of their ladies serving in far-flung posts hankered for the great browns of the Test and Itchen as did their Scot cousins for those of the Clyde, Tweed, Esk, and scores of other marvelous cold rivers in the United Kingdom. After all, few pleasures were as civilized as casting for browns with Hardy Palakona cane rods outfitted with the firm's Perfect fly reels. Cricket and polo were lovely diversions in the lowlands of India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile. But when temperatures and humidity boiled at the height of summer, Anglo-expats simply had to seek cooler climes and more genteel pursuits. Brown trout are native to geography stretching from Iceland, all the way through Europe and Africa along the Mediterranean, into the Aral watershed in Uzbekistan. In 1864 Englishman James Youl pioneered the first stocking of brown trout that reproduced naturally in one of the farthest reaches of the empire. That was in Tasmania's Plenty River. Arriving after some 90 days at sea and packed in iced-down crates of wet moss, only 300 eyed eggs out of 30,000 survived. The plan had been to introduce Atlantic salmon, and trout were included as an afterthought. Alas, all the salmon perished. Progeny of the first and subsequent trout stockings spawned the robust populations that thrive in rivers in southeastern Australia and New Zealand as well. Youl was knighted for his ingenuity. Why Tasmania? I wondered while writing Great Water, Great John Ross ravel T Fish: The World Wide Guide to Fly Fishing. And I didn't find my answer until driving from the Chilean provincial capital of Punta Arenas up along the north shore of the Straits of Magellan to the ferry at Punta Delgada where we'd turn south, cross the straits, and make for the gentle headwaters of the Rio Grande near Estancia Camerón. Sea-run browns arrive there in February and March, the streams are easily wadeable, and neither precision nor distance is the key to casting. About 80 miles into the trek we passed Estancia San Gregorio, once the heart of the Menéndez wool conglomerate. Millions of sheep were raised on its rolling grasslands. They were shorn in long sheds. Steamships docked at the estancia's wharfs and loaded bales of fine wool bound for English mills. Merino wool had brought the Brits and their browns to Tierra del Fuego, just as they had many years earlier to Tasmania. Expansion of the empire had exploded in the mid-1800s after Englishman Samuel Greg devised waterwheels to power spinning and knitting mills, heretofore a cottage industry throughout the United Kingdom and the rest of the globe. Steam-powered factories soon followed, creating an insatiable demand for raw wool and cotton, which the British were only too eager to exploit. Five years after India became its colony in 1858, the Credit the early Brits for introducing brown trout in their colonies and territories virtually around the world. The Rio Grande in Chile fishes like the Madison below Montana's Quake Lake, except the browns are sea-run and measured in pounds, not inches.