Using the 75-ton schooner France,[3] with many different scientists and collectors participating over more than a dozen years, the expedition visited thousands of islands throughout Oceania, Micronesia, Polynesia and Melanesia.

[9] In September 1927, Hannibal Hamlin and Guy Richards, both recent Yale graduates, arrived in the Solomon Islands to join the expedition while Drowne was unwell.

[15] Ernst Mayr from the Berlin Museum joined the expedition on its trip to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in 1929, after Hamlin had replaced Beck as leader.

John Boyd ("Jack") Riddall, born in England in 1905, joined the expedition as a bird collector and skinner at the Solomon Islands in May 1930.

[16]: 115 [17] Riddall left the expedition in 1932,[18] lived in Australia and in 1942 enlisted as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Australian Air Force.

Macmillan and his wife Joy collected and processed birds for the expedition in New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Papua New Guinea and Queensland, Australia.

[1] When the France left Papeete on 1 February 1922 the crew consisted of the captain, mate, engineer, cook, three sailors and a cabin boy, as well as Beck, Quayle and Curtis.

[30]: 3  The ship was sold to WR Carpenter and Co.[31] Renamed Dawaun, she was wrecked when she ran aground on a reef off the Carteret Islands on 29 October 1936.

Sometimes the expedition members would set up a base on land and process the birds there,[10]: 176  but otherwise skinning was typically done by the light of benzine lamps in the hold of the France.

[33]: 223  Supplies needed for processing birds included arsenic, alum, benzine, cornmeal, needles, bone cutters, cotton wrapping and labels.

"It is certainly an art to accomplish it the way it ought to be done, that is to say removing the skeleton, bones, flesh, intestines and fatty parts, leaving the wings and feathers properly sewed for mounting or museum reference".

Once cleaned we washed the whole thing in gasolene, then inserted sticks and bamboos in the neck and body to hold the skin apart so that it might dry more quickly.

Sundays, supposedly a day off, were the only time available for typing up notes, making sketches, preparing labels and getting ready for the week ahead.

As you want to send some specimens of these almost distinct forms to the British Musem, the limit, ten, is in the case of insectivorous birds, entirely too small a number.

He stated that he had heard that Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology believed that all New Zealand's native birds were "doomed" and should therefore be collected before they became extinct.

Sanderson wrote to the Minister of Internal Affairs: That an extensively equipped foreign collecting expedition on such a scale and with permission to kill the extravagant number of birds allowed should be given entirely unrestricted liberty, except by a few valueless written conditions, amongst our birds, some of which are on the verge of extinction, is unthinkable, a slur on the regard which the people of New Zealand are evincing in the welfare of their heritage, the care of which is entrusted to your department.

Your action is also a slight to the operations of this society, and it seems idle and hypocritical for us to continue further work and collect subscriptions from school children and others in the face of such departmental lassitude.

Beck wrote to Murphy in February 1926: "Somehow, the Government located us and sent us an urgent telegram yesterday saying that Mr. Oliver of the Dominion Museum wanted to accompany us to the southern islands.

There is a very great deal yet to be discovered concerning the habits of the birds, and it is only by means of the facts ascertained and the specimens obtained by an expedition such as this, that scientists can arrive at the truth.

However, as Walter Oliver from the Dominion Museum pointed out, Beck had also discovered during the expedition that birds that breed in New Zealand may migrate as far as Chile or California.

[41] Members of the expedition contracted various ailments including arsenic poisoning,[42]: 183  dengue fever, malaria and tropical ulcers or "island sores".

[10]: 95  Drowne wrote in his journal that Beck was a remarkable success as a bird collector, but a failure as a leader in the field: He is unable to work even to the best advantage, or to inspire [the men's] cooperation and loyalty.

A feeling of loyalty to the Museum, or to someone else abroad has kept men on this thing, as in the case of sailors a contract, when otherwise they would have made sudden and speedy departure.

[34]: 100 Drowne also believed that it was important to establish friendly relations with the local people when entering their territory.The France faced gales and storms and high seas in the Pacific Ocean.

On 2 June 1926 the expedition met particularly bad weather, which the captain recorded in his logbook: "Sky extremely ugly [...] Squalls at frequent intervals of severe intensity and with heavy rain, hail, lightning and thunder.

Everybody in the ship thought that they were never going to see land again, but God did not forget us in the middle of the furious ocean.”[44] Approaching reefs in smaller boats could also be extremely dangerous.

After an incident where an islander nearly drowned trying to get a boat through the surf of a coral reef in bad weather, Quayle noted that it was no job for "inexperienced white men".

The expedition was able to confirm the role of geographical isolation in the development of new species, as described by Darwin in his studies of finches in the Galapagos Islands almost a hundred years earlier.

[66][42] The expedition was also able to confirm the long-distance migration patterns of various sea birds including the long-tailed cuckoo (Urodynamis taitensis).

The ship Director II, a three-masted, 110-ton auxiliary schooner, left New York in February 1940, travelling to Australia via the Panama Canal and various Pacific Islands.