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. 5 journeys so far, 1960 to 1968, 3,378 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions168 days in the field141,296 km between stops1,977 photographed specimens
5 journeys match
Ernani Meñez
50 islands · Jun – Sep 1960
Ernani Meñez across 50 islands, June – September 19602,317 specimens · 38 stops · 100 days · 40,857 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
M.A. Evans
21 islands · Jun – Aug 1965
M.A. Evans across 21 islands, June – August 1965313 specimens · 36 stops · 62 days · 22,345 km
B. Emmons
5 islands of Palau · Dec 1967 – Feb 1968
B. Emmons across 5 islands of Palau, December 1967 – February 196865 specimens · 18 stops · 61 days · 4,935 km
F. Raymond Fosberg
7 islands · 8–24 Nov 1968
F. Raymond Fosberg across 7 islands, 8–24 November 196877 specimens · 9 stops · 17 days · 40,884 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.