A 'stick chart' from the Marshall Islands. It is made from flat wooden sticks bound together with fibres and tied with individual cowrie shells.

Marshall Islands navigational charts are unique objects for discussing the complex and ephemeral nature of navigational techniques in the Pacific. Known from the 19th century, these charts allowed Marshall islanders to negotiate the 34 low islands in the archipelago, which can only be seen from a few miles away at sea level. The islanders were renowned for their skill in navigating these waters in seafaring canoes.

Charts act as an aide memoire and a teaching tool for communicating rich, oral navigational traditions. The vertical and horizontal sticks create a structure, with cowrie shells indicating specific islands. The curved and diagonal sticks represent known swells and wave patterns. Different sizes of chart represent either the whole Marshall Islands group or specific areas. This is a particularly large and beautiful example.

With the spread of European interest and travel in the Pacific in the nineteenth century, islanders began to make traditional ethnographic objects specifically for gift or exchange with visiting Europeans. A tourist trade developed in the twentieth century. This particular chart was bought in the 1970s in a Marshall Island craft shop, so is unlikely to have been used to teach navigation. It is examplary of growing ethnographic collecting and tourist economies in the Pacific, as well as traditional navigational practices.