How it began
The Marshall Islands, a scatter of low islands and atolls in the North Pacific, have been inhabited for around 3,000 years. Centuries ago the Marshallese built outrigger canoes and developed their own system of piloting, based on sensing the motion of the waves. Stick charts grew out of that system as a way to record and teach what navigators, known as ri-meto, knew. No maker or date of the first chart is recorded. The system was first made public in 1862 in a notice by a resident missionary.
Before it existed
The islands rise only a few feet above the sea and cannot be seen from more than a few miles away, so travel between them depended on reading the water itself. That knowledge was held by navigators and passed from one generation of ri-meto to the next by experience at sea. The charts gave that knowledge a physical form that could be studied on land.
How it works
The charts were made from coconut and palm strips tied into a frame, with cowrie shells marking islands or atolls. Curved strips showed how swells bend around land, and points where strips cross marked disturbed seas that told a navigator where he was. The mattang was an abstract teaching model of swells around a single island. The meddo showed real islands in part of a chain with courses between them, and the rebbelib covered most or all of one or both island chains. The charts were not to scale, were often readable only by their maker, and were memorized before a voyage, not carried to sea.
How it spread
Outsiders learned of the system slowly. After the 1862 notice, it was described in detail by Captain Winkler of the Imperial German Navy, who commanded SMS Bussard in the Marshall Islands in 1896, when the islands were under German rule, and published his account in 1898. Charts were collected in the late 19th century and entered museum collections. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History holds 15 of them.
Who pushed back
Scientists and scholars at one time doubted the accuracy of Marshallese navigation. Researchers have since found that the navigators' techniques align closely with ocean phenomena such as wave reflection and refraction as they are understood today, and that the navigators were precise.
Where it stands today
Much of the navigation knowledge has been lost because of cultural shifts and outside pressures, and the charts no longer have their old practical role. They remain culturally important to the Marshallese and are studied by anthropologists as evidence of how people adapted to life surrounded by the sea.
