Marshall Islands Stick Chart
Navigation chart of the Marshall Islands built from pandanus ribs and coconut fibre, with small cowrie shells marking the islands and curved sticks recording the swell and wave patterns of the ocean. Charts come in three kinds: the mattang, which teaches the principles of wave reflection without naming real islands; the meddo, covering a particular group of reefs; and the rebbelib, a large chart of the whole archipelago. Read and memorised by trained navigators before a voyage and then left ashore, the charts encode wave and current knowledge passed down within navigators' families, and the sa