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, 1982 to 1986, 328 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions84 days in the field22,380 km between stops92 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
W.A. Whistler
9 islands · Apr – Jun 1985
W.A. Whistler across 9 islands, April – June 1985140 specimens · 32 stops · 75 days · 9,570 km
W.R. Sykes
3 islands of the Cook Islands · Aug – Sep 1982
W.R. Sykes in Rarotonga, Mitiaro and Mauke, August – September 198287 specimens · 24 stops · 25 days
W.A. Whistler
4 islands of the Cook Islands · Jul – Aug 1986
W.A. Whistler across 4 islands of the Cook Islands, July – August 198656 specimens · 20 stops · 58 days · 5,124 km
M.D. Merlin
5 islands · Jul – Aug 1986
M.D. Merlin across 5 islands, July – August 198645 specimens · 8 stops · 41 days · 7,686 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.