No.

As documented above, all Tasmania's browns and South New Zealand stem from the trout carried on the Norfolk.


PiB

I'm sure we would be correct in assuming that these went on to produce hybrid's with the Loch Leven strain introduced later on. A sort of River Itchen x River Wey X Loch Leven cross???

This article is is quite intersting . . .

http://www.ozpedia.org/Plenty,+Tasmania

I'm curious; '6 breeding pairs' - I thought it would have been much much more.
I assume the 'salmon ponds' are those at Plenty that I refered to earlier.


PiB

Extract from the 'ozpedia' link above:
"The Commission chose Plenty as the site for the salmon ponds which would eventually be the nursery for the introduced ova, as they could be fed by cold, clear waters, and were also connected to the sea. The ponds were constructed in 1862 and were based on the famous Stormontfield Ponds on the River Tay in Scotland. Land for the ponds was generously donated by William Read, owner of the Redlands estate.

Youl and William Ramsbottom were sent to England in 1863, and by experimentation discovered that if the ova were packed in a refrigerated compartment, and kept airtight, over 70% of the ova hatched.

A plan was devised to transport the ova in moss packed boxes placed in an ice house. In 1864 the clipper Norfolk left England with 100,000 salmon and 3,000 trout ova. It was never intended to introduce trout, but the ova had been given as a gift by well wishing naturalists.

Eighty four days later the Norfolk arrived in Hobsons Bay in Victoria, and 11 boxes of salmon ova were left in Melbourne. The steamship Victoria took charge of the remaining cargo, set sail for Hobart, and was met at the Derwent River estuary by the river steamer Emu who towed her up as far as they could.

From there the boxes were loaded onto pack horses and transported to the Salmon ponds at Plenty. William Ramsbottom went ahead to prepare the ponds for the ova, and the main party arrived on 21st of April 1864, 91 days after the expedition had left England.

About 30,000 ova survived the trek and were "planted" in the ponds. On the 4th of May 1864, the first trout fry appeared, and a day later the first salmon appeared. The salmon introduction proved to be unsuccessful, but the trout flourished, and the Great Lake was stocked in 1870.

Brook trout were introduced in 1883, and rainbow trout in 1898. Experiments were carried out on species of salmon in 1902 and 1910, as well as Loch Leven trout in 1888 and 1889."

Yes that is probably the case.


Yes only six pairs survived to breed according to the article. Thirty fish escaped into the plenty river from those 200 eggs that were hatched.

The article by the way was written by Mr Grahame Mole who at the time of writing lived a mile away from the hatchery at Bishopstoke. Apparently there are remnants of the hatchery still there. Must try and have a look at it one day.

Regards
Mat

__________________
www.flyodyssey.co.uk

http://www.flyodyssey.co.uk/newsletters.html

Anyone really interested in this subject should try to get hold one of a couple of books.
Chronologically, the first was entitled 'Speckled Nomads' and was published in 1938 - revised 1945, by Collins.
The one I have was published in 1946 and is now called 'The Swift Trout'.
The author, H.E. Towner Coston, states quite categorically that 'I do know at least that the first batch of ova to reach the Antipodes alive was the consignment of January, 1864. The later progeny, undoubted descendants of these fish served to stock, or supplement the stock of many New Zealand rivers and lakes'.
The eggs came from The Itchen, a stretch owned by Admiral Keppel, that was known in those days as The Silver River.
The story is excellent, well worth a read, in fact I have only just re-read it for the umpteenth time (I was given the book in about 1950 by my dad)
I suspect they are not 'collector's items' of real value and can be picked up for a few pence - if you can find one - from a second hand bookshop.

David

p.s. Not true I discover, you might have to pay up to £10 for the first one - from here anyway http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/thorn/2465.shtml
or £5 for the second from the same place http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/dal/1523.shtml

__________________
Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open

Ok based on Mats article from Flylife there was 2000 Brown trout ova from Francis Francis and 1000 Brown Trout Ova from Admiral Keppel.

I cant remember why Im posting this now

What a mother of an operation though. Amazing.

__________________
a fisherman who has completed his mortal time discovers he has actually gone to hell when condemned for eternity to fish for one species in one stretch of river.

According to Joseph Armistead (1898) there was about 2700 in the shipment.

There seem's to be a slight conflict in the story's. Graham mole suggest's that francis Fransic was going to supply 2,000 egg's, Buckland 1,000.

Bryn Hammond's story would suggest Francis Francis was going to supply the 'planned' 3,000 but was only able to obtain 1,500 but despite arriving at the dock independantly of each other (and I assume there were no mobile phones in 1864) Buckland arrived with ' the balance'!

It's a good story anyway, it may not appeal to everyone but I am fascinated with fishing history - it's not all about owning £3,000 Hardy reel's!!

I wrote this story up in The Field in '99 / 2000. It was great fun researching it and I've thought about developing it into a book. Not got round to it yet ... but maybe I should. Anyway, here's the text of the final version I sent to The Field. I may have some notes somewhere too. I'll take a look.

By the way, when you get to the mention I was later corrected about James Youl – he wasn't "employed" by the Acclimatisation Soc.

Charles RW

Before the 4th May 1864 there were no trout in the southern hemisphere. Many had thought that there never would be: “You may as well try to fetch Australia to England as to carry spawn to it in moss,” wrote Robert Ramsbottom, an eminent breeder of salmon, to James Youl, the man trying to take them there.

Homesick colonial fishermen eyed their local streams with longing. Wherever the map was red, and land was high enough and water cold enough, new world fishermen imagined scenes of highland bliss in their adopted lands; of “bringing the lordly salmon to grass among picturesque granitic hills, which may well recall many a wild scene in the highlands of bonnie Scotland, or the softer glories of the Irish lakes,” wrote Arthur Nicols.

If the physical difficulties of carrying trout and salmon 16,000 miles on a voyage lasting three months were considerable, the Victorians never questioned the ethics of success, even though the new “exotics” would most likely oust the native fish. “Though a distant and obscure relative (of the trout) is found in some rivers of India, and another in New Zealand and the Falkland Islands, no one ignorant of anatomy would suspect the remotest connection of these imposters with the noble stock.”

Shipping out the best of the old world to the new in the mid-nineteenth century was nothing more than a good idea, and the Victorians played God in doing so.

By 1861 the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria had filled the Melbourne Gardens with camels, magpies, skylarks, Angora goats, and English pheasants, among a host of other beasts, and the thrush, blackbird and starling could be heard in all directions. But there weren’t any trout.

In 1860 they employed James Youl to pack 30,000 salmon ova from the Dovey. The S Curling left Liverpool on February 25, eight years after a Mr Boccius had tried to ship trout to Tasmania and failed, the ova shaken and parboiled by the time they reached the tropics. This time, Youl’s apparatus was ingenious and complicated. The ice house was lined with lead, and charcoal. Above it, a water tank with a pipe passing round the ice, spilled cold water onto the ova, which lay on gravel swing-trays on an incline. But the ova died. More ice was needed.

Next time, the ice melted when the ship was no further south than on the first voyage, and there were protests in the press about misuse of money. But Youl had discovered the principle of success when he included a small pine box of ova and moss, and placed it in the middle of the ice.

After a series of experiments in the vaults of the Wenham Lake Ice Company in London, he found that he could dispense with the gimbals, swing trays and plumbing, and simply pack the eggs in ice. He took pleasure in proving his critics wrong. We “exhumed one of the boxes containing ova that had been buried (as many persons prognosticated, in their icy graves) on the 17th January last. I cannot describe the anxiety of all present to get a first sight of these ova, or the pleasure visible on every countenance to find as the moss (shrouds, as many expected) was removed, our little friends alive and perfectly healthy.”

In January 1864 the Norfolk sailed with 100,000 salmon and 3000 trout ova packed under fifty tons of ice. Eighty-four days later she dropped anchor in Hobson’s Bay, Melbourne. Half the shipment was quickly transferred by steamship to Tasmania, transferred again into a barge which was towed to the wharf at New Norfolk. By sunrise the next day fifty men and ten teams of horses were waiting. Boxes and ice were slung in blankets on bamboo poles and walked overland to the hatching ponds on the River Plenty. Of the three thousand trout ova, 200 hatched.

James Youl had done the impossible, but Youl was always too modest. His friend Frank Buckland who had helped with some of the experiments inspired the wrath of Arthur Nicols for taking credit that didn’t belong to him. Nicols wrote to the Field: “I wish to give him (Frank Buckland) the opportunity of unbinding the wreath of triumph from his brows. The whole of the success has been claimed by Mr Buckland repeatedly, and he has not been careful to disavow the honour at all times in all places.”

As it happened, that voyage was the first and only successful shipment of brown trout to Tasmania. Most of the time and money was spent sending out salmon ova. 867,000 were taken in ten voyages between 1861 and 1879, though they never established themselves in the south seas. Of those original 200 trout hatchlings, 30 escaped into the River Plenty, and six pairs survived in the ponds to spawn. The great grandparents of every brown trout in every river in Tasmania, Australia and New Zealand.

They grew well too. Ten years on a trout of over 16 lbs was caught in the Tasmanian Derwent, one of 5 1/2 lb was caught in the River Clyde, and a Mr Weaver took six trout weighing 30 lbs. Writers got carried away, with a mixture of wishful thinking and apocaliptic vision: “Long after our home fish have attained so critical an experience as to know at a glance the maker of the fly offered them – they really seem to be coming to this – the unsophisticated denizens of Australia will rush at the grasshopper impaled on the bent pin of the rustic urchin. Long before the end of this century when a growing population shall have driven the salmon in disgust from most of our rivers, the sportsman will take his rod, and seek among the fern covered ranges of the Australian Alps, and the deep tarns and pools of Tasmania and New Zealand, the noble quarry which has found a home in the antopdes.”

Looked at from our end of history there might well have been a dose of arrogance behind the acclimatisation movement. You have to be sure of your place in the universe to look at a native species, and call it an “imposter”. And yet southern hemisphere trout fishing is big tourism industry now, and one which governments seem determined to protect. The Victorian spirit which we might question today has undoubtedly given us a magnificent legacy. It is ironic that those New Zealand brown trout came from two home-counties streams that have been wiped out by pollution: the Wey and The Wick. The Wick famous for its strain of beautiful, fast-growing trout. We might well end up shipping them back.


Fact Bubbles.

In 1890 JD Ellis an auctioneer in King William’s Town, South Africa, wrote, “Our splendid border streams, barren of the finny tribe, open to us a large field of enterprise.” Ellis had already spent a small fortune trying to import trout. In 1882 his first shipment of 20,000 had been “lost through misadventure”. In 1884 he succeeded in hatching out fry, but overnight the water temperature rose suddenly and cooked his fish. It took until 1898 for success to reward the hard work, after failures in 1891 and 1895, each attempt involving long, uphill journeys with teams of oxen, and trout ova wrapped in ice and blankets.

As early as 1863 the naturalist Francis Day proposed the idea of introducing trout to the Neilgherry Hills to the Governor of Madras. He tried and failed in 1866. Mr MacIvor succeeded in 1868, and in 1876 Day found a specimen which he illustrated in his book The Fishes of India.

In 1899 Frank Mitchell, Colonel AE Ward, Colonel Unwin and Captain Allan each put up £50 towards importing trout from Scotland to Kashmir. The Duke of Bedford promised the ova, but the first batch perished on board the steamer. The second batch arrived in good health at Srinagar in December 1900. When hatched they were fed in Mitchell’s garden pond, and the offspring of these fish were distributed to Assam, Kulu, Nainital, and Gilgit, and also to Bhutan.

Between 1935 and ’37 brown trout were successfully established in Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, along with brook trout and rainbow trout. Some attempts were made to establish brown trout in the Falkland Islands during World War Two, but in August 1947 the Chilean government gave 30,000 trout ova as a gift, and in the same year 10,00 ova were flown out from the Surrey Trout Farm. Anglers started to catch trout on float-fished mutton in 1954, but between 1957 and ’59 large trout were caught which had apparently been feeding at sea. One weighed 12 lbs.