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, 1922 to 1971, 1,037 specimens between them.
3 collectors and expeditions92 days in the field10,187 km between stops275 photographed specimens
3 journeys match
Wood Jones
22 islands · Jul – Dec 1922
Wood Jones across 22 islands, July – December 1922478 specimens · 45 stops · 142 days · 3,823 km
Jim Haywood
19 islands of French Polynesia · Dec 1970 – May 1971
Jim Haywood across 19 islands of French Polynesia, December 1970 – May 1971499 specimens · 36 stops · 162 days · 4,655 km
A. Haywood
4 islands · Apr – May 1971
A. Haywood across 4 islands, April – May 197160 specimens · 5 stops · 32 days · 1,709 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.