Whitney South Sea Expedition.

The Whitney South Seas Expedition which took place between 1920 and 1940, was sponsored by Harry Payne Whitney and involved several leaders, the most important ones being Rollo H. Beck, Hannibal Hamlin, and Lindsay Macmillan. The main purpose of this expedition was to collect bird specimens.

The Whitney South Sea Expedition was hailed as the longest ornithological voyage in history, and the botanical specimens collected were vital to understanding bird habitation patterns. In 1920, the American Museum of Natural History, with the financial aid of Harry Payne Whitney, funded this expedition to islands in the South Pacific. Dr. Leonard C. Sanford—a trustee for the American Natural History Museum—hired Rollo Beck to complete field work with Naturalists Ernst H. Quayle and Charles Curtis. Together they gathered approximately 40,000 birds, plants, and other faunal specimens from over 600 islands. Many articles written about the expedition have shown that “with the exception of certain specimens given to [the Smithsonian Institution and Bishop Museum]…all the specimens collected by the expedition were sent to the American Museum.” Beck, Quayle, Curtis, and the expedition team set sail for the Tahitian island Papeete to establish a base that would enable easier travel to the islands of Eastern Polynesia. Along the way, the naturalists mainly focused on collecting birds. However, after observing that the populations of native people and wildlife were dying off on certain islands, they began studying the flora in hopes of discovering an environmental pattern that could potentially lead them to the cause. No definite connection was found, but an incredible amount of plant specimens were collected. The success of the Whitney expedition provided the American Museum with the largest ornithological collection in the country. Whitney even donated an additional $750,000 to build a separate wing for the museum to house the collection. Beck’s overzealous collecting, however, led to the extinction of several species of birds. The botanical specimens did not create as much controversy as the ornithological specimens, but did provide future botanists with significant new information about the plants of the South Pacific.