Journeys
The expeditions, reassembled
Every dated label is a diary entry. Read a collector’s labels in order and the voyage comes back: the islands in sequence, the days at each, the specimens from every stop. 3 journeys so far, 1938 to 1939, 769 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions52 days in the field14,324 km between stops379 photographed specimens
3 journeys match
Truman George Yuncker
6 islands · Sep – Dec 1939
Truman George Yuncker across 6 islands, September – December 1939573 specimens · 26 stops · 81 days · 2,624 km
Edwin Horace Bryan Jr.
14 islands · Jul – Sep 1938
Edwin Horace Bryan Jr. across 14 islands, July – September 1938131 specimens · 17 stops · 49 days · 11,700 km
Wray Harris
Tau · 10–27 Jul 1938
Wray Harris in Tau, 10–27 July 193865 specimens · 6 stops · 18 days
How a journey is found
Every specimen with a full date (year, month and day; a bare “1 January” is treated as a missing day) and a named collector is a diary entry. For each collector the days are read in order, each day given the place most of its labels name. The place where a collector spent more than forty percent of their days, and at least sixty of them, is home: days there are left out.
A gap of more than 21 days between collecting days ends one journey and begins the next. A journey must run five to four hundred days, hold at least forty specimens and touch at least two places. Within it, consecutive days inside the same or a neighbouring tenth-of-a-degree cell (about eleven kilometres) are one stop; the stop’s point is the mean of its labels’ coordinates, or the island’s centre when none carry any.
Companions are collectors whose own labels put them in the same cell on the same days. Staff can name a journey, write about it, feature it or hide it; those words survive every rebuild. Everything else is read off the specimens and rebuilt by harvest.mjs expeditions as the records improve.