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. 53 journeys so far, 1921 to 1995, 52,393 specimens between them.
40 collectors and expeditions1,685 days in the field461,825 km between stops46,111 photographed specimens
53 journeys match
Elwood C. Zimmerman Gessler
Moorea and Raiatea · Sep – Oct 1934
Elwood C. Zimmerman Gessler in Moorea and Raiatea, September – October 193494 specimens · 2 stops · 14 days · 183 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
Anderson Gessler
Moorea and Huahine · Sep – Oct 1934
Anderson Gessler in Moorea and Huahine, September – October 193498 specimens · 2 stops · 7 days · 149 km
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Kenneth Pike Emory
3 islands · Sep – Nov 1925
Kenneth Pike Emory in Moorea, Tahiti and Huahine, September – November 192546 specimens · 3 stops · 38 days · 189 km
M.-H Sachet
4 islands · Jun – Jul 1976
M.-H Sachet across 4 islands, June – July 197646 specimens · 8 stops · 28 days · 2,621 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.