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, 1934 to 1934, 13,822 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions359 days in the field59,216 km between stops12,628 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
Donald Anderson
34 islands · Apr – Oct 1934
Donald Anderson across 34 islands, April – October 19348,872 specimens · 35 stops · 202 days · 16,221 km
F. Raymond Fosberg
32 islands · Apr – Oct 1934
F. Raymond Fosberg across 32 islands, April – October 19342,503 specimens · 85 stops · 201 days · 23,387 km
Elwood Curtin Zimmerman
21 islands · Feb – Oct 1934
Elwood Curtin Zimmerman across 21 islands, February – October 19341,714 specimens · 56 stops · 248 days · 12,587 km
Samuel Wight
16 islands of French Polynesia · May – Oct 1934
Samuel Wight across 16 islands of French Polynesia, May – October 1934733 specimens · 24 stops · 156 days · 7,021 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.