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. 4 journeys so far, 1946 to 1946, 3,788 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions183 days in the field122,874 km between stops1,561 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
F. Raymond Fosberg
56 islands · Apr – Nov 1946
F. Raymond Fosberg across 56 islands, April – November 19462,439 specimens · 102 stops · 209 days · 105,682 km
Harold St.John
13 islands · Jul – Nov 1946
Harold St.John across 13 islands, July – November 1946590 specimens · 27 stops · 120 days · 9,900 km
R.S. Cowan
11 islands · Aug – Sep 1946
R.S. Cowan across 11 islands, August – September 1946484 specimens · 17 stops · 41 days · 1,023 km
Donald P. Rogers
11 islands · Apr – Sep 1946
Donald P. Rogers across 11 islands, April – September 1946275 specimens · 28 stops · 162 days · 6,269 km
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.