Home » Scientific Research » Herbarium Collections » Type Collection
The Whitney South Seas Expedition
The Whitney Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History was begun in the summer of 1920. Its original purpose, championed by American Museum trustee Dr. Leonard Sanford, was to study the birds of the Pacific Islands. The expedition was funded by Harry Payne Whitney and his family.
The expedition was unlike any other. Instead of being a single trek, the expedition visited thousands of islands, led by many different scientists and collectors, over more than a dozen years. Administered by a committee at the American Museum, the Whitney Expedition became a source of funds and equipment for collecting and research on the Pacific Islands.
The France at Tahiti (California Academy of Sciences, used by permission)
The first leader of the expedition was Rollo H. Beck, a veteran collector and naturalist. He hired Ernst H. Qualye and Charles Curtis, and together they made most of the botanical collections for the expedition. They sailed among the islands on the sailing ship France, stopping at islands large and small. They collected in Tahiti, the Society Islands, the Marquesas, Raivavae, and Rapa. Later, Edwin H. Bryan Jr. collected plant specimens in Fiji.
The main set of botanical specimens was sent to the Bernice Bishop Museum, in Honolulu, Hawaii, where the speciemens were identified and described by F.B. Brown. Sets of duplicates were sent to Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Field books and papers related to the expeditions are at the Bishop Museum and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
References
F. B. Brown published a series of papers describing many of the botanical collections from the Whitney Expedition in the Bishop Museum Bulletin.
The holotypes of new plant species described from the Expedition collections are in the Bishop Museum Herbarium. A database of the collection can be searched at theHerbarium Pacificum site.
The pacific travels of Rollo Beck were the subject of an exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences.
The establishment of the Expedition was described by R. C. Murphy in Science 56: 701--704. 1922.
Frank M. Chapman, of the American Museum of Natural History, defended the Expedition against rumors and charges of overcollecting in an article in Science 81: 5--97. 1935
Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. George Staples, the curator of the Herbarium Pacificum at the Bishop Museum, for his help in identifying and documenting the Whitney Expedition collections.