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, 1934 to 1934, 18,743 specimens between them.
4 collectors and expeditions286 days in the field34,577 km between stops18,679 photographed specimens
4 journeys match
Mangarevan Expedition
29 islands · May – Nov 1934
Mangarevan Expedition, May – November 193415,215 specimens · 33 stops · 173 days · 12,849 km
Elwood Curtin Zimmerman
21 islands · Feb – Oct 1934
Elwood Curtin Zimmerman across 21 islands, February – October 19341,714 specimens · 56 stops · 248 days · 12,587 km
Elwood C. Zimmerman
12 islands · May – Oct 1934
Elwood C. Zimmerman across 12 islands, May – October 19341,001 specimens · 14 stops · 140 days · 5,332 km
Mangarevan Expedition
9 islands · Jun – Oct 1934
Mangarevan Expedition, June – October 1934813 specimens · 13 stops · 114 days · 3,809 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.