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, 1922 to 1975, 1,563 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions180 days in the field17,273 km between stops772 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
Ernest H. Quayle
25 islands · Jun – Nov 1922
Ernest H. Quayle across 25 islands, June – November 1922642 specimens · 56 stops · 162 days · 7,539 km
Wood Jones
22 islands · Jul – Dec 1922
Wood Jones across 22 islands, July – December 1922478 specimens · 45 stops · 142 days · 3,823 km
M.-H Sachet
8 islands of French Polynesia · Nov 1974 – Feb 1975
M.-H Sachet across 8 islands of French Polynesia, November 1974 – February 1975286 specimens · 34 stops · 108 days · 4,737 km
Whitney Expedition
27 islands of French Polynesia · Feb – Jul 1923
Whitney Expedition, February – July 1923157 specimens · 34 stops · 154 days · 1,174 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.