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. 5 journeys so far, 1925 to 1975, 1,101 specimens between them.
5 collectors and expeditions128 days in the field23,411 km between stops550 photographed specimens
5 journeys match
R.S. Cowan
11 islands · Aug – Sep 1946
R.S. Cowan across 11 islands, August – September 1946484 specimens · 17 stops · 41 days · 1,023 km
Wm. R. Taylor
6 islands · Feb – Aug 1946
Wm. R. Taylor across 6 islands, February – August 1946242 specimens · 52 stops · 156 days · 5,901 km
Harold St.John
15 islands · Dec 1945 – May 1946
Harold St.John across 15 islands, December 1945 – May 1946194 specimens · 23 stops · 147 days · 16,487 km
A. Hof
8 islands of Bermuda · Jun – Aug 1925
A. Hof across 8 islands of Bermuda, June – August 1925116 specimens · 20 stops · 37 days
Edwin Horace Bryan Jr.
4 islands · Feb – Mar 1975
Edwin Horace Bryan Jr. across 4 islands, February – March 197565 specimens · 7 stops · 18 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.