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, 1949 to 2002, 1,296 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions136 days in the field55,767 km between stops768 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
H.A. Miller
26 islands · Jun – Aug 1960
H.A. Miller across 26 islands, June – August 1960410 specimens · 37 stops · 90 days · 20,099 km
Sydney Glassman
8 islands · Jun – Sep 1949
Sydney Glassman across 8 islands, June – September 1949524 specimens · 41 stops · 82 days · 1,957 km
Benjamin C. Stone
22 islands · Feb – Aug 1957
Benjamin C. Stone across 22 islands, February – August 1957301 specimens · 47 stops · 169 days · 33,594 km
M.J. Balick
4 islands of Micronesia · 5–17 Aug 2002
M.J. Balick across 4 islands of Micronesia, 5–17 August 200261 specimens · 3 stops · 13 days · 117 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.