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 1982, 3,435 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions212 days in the field180,999 km between stops1,414 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
F. Raymond Fosberg
28 islands · Jun – Sep 1965
F. Raymond Fosberg across 28 islands, June – September 1965606 specimens · 53 stops · 87 days · 32,275 km
Robert Hobdy
17 islands · Apr – Aug 1982
Robert Hobdy across 17 islands, April – August 1982250 specimens · 24 stops · 106 days · 16,977 km
Harold St.John
16 islands · Jun – Aug 1956
Harold St.John across 16 islands, June – August 1956140 specimens · 31 stops · 69 days · 26,065 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.