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. 3 journeys so far, 1921 to 1922, 754 specimens between them.
2 collectors and expeditions82 days in the field14,112 km between stops381 photographed specimens
3 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
Ernest H. Quayle
8 islands · Dec 1921 – Feb 1922
Ernest H. Quayle across 8 islands, December 1921 – February 192246 specimens · 12 stops · 57 days · 6,573 km
C.C. Curtis
9 islands of French Polynesia · 5–29 Jun 1922
C.C. Curtis across 9 islands of French Polynesia, 5–29 June 192266 specimens · 9 stops · 25 days
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.