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, 1964 to 1973, 1,110 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions94 days in the field30,124 km between stops
3 journeys match
Johnson Randall
10 islands · Jan – Apr 1973
Johnson Randall across 10 islands, January – April 1973499 specimens · 49 stops · 110 days · 10,184 km
Robert H. Snider
14 islands · Sep 1964 – Jan 1965
Robert H. Snider across 14 islands, September 1964 – January 1965519 specimens · 28 stops · 139 days · 19,940 km
J. Howard Choat
3 islands · 10–22 Jan 1973
J. Howard Choat in One Tree, Heron Island and Wistari Reef, 10–22 January 197392 specimens · 9 stops · 13 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.