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, 1956 to 1971, 4,240 specimens between them.
1 collectors and expeditions266 days in the field117,442 km between stops4 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
Johnson Randall
27 islands · Dec 1970 – May 1971
Johnson Randall across 27 islands, December 1970 – May 19712,367 specimens · 98 stops · 175 days · 9,120 km
Johnson Randall
25 islands · Mar – Dec 1968
Johnson Randall across 25 islands, March – December 19681,676 specimens · 99 stops · 261 days · 106,577 km
Johnson Randall
5 islands · Feb – May 1956
Johnson Randall across 5 islands, February – May 1956111 specimens · 14 stops · 108 days · 128 km
Johnson Randall
9 islands of French Polynesia · Feb – Jul 1957
Johnson Randall across 9 islands of French Polynesia, February – July 195786 specimens · 22 stops · 146 days · 1,617 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.