Minimoonstar

INDY as himself

A comic for the end of summer 🍃🍂

This morning I was just minding my business on a hike only to look over and see a ton of flaccid stinkhorns (Mutinus ravenelii) adorning a sandstone cliff face.

Polynesians did also rely on a form of a physical map called a stick chart, illustrating the specific wave and swell patterns surrounding different island chains. These were particularly helpful during cloudy conditions when the sun and stars were less useful. To navigate the Marshall Islands, the Marshallese represented ocean swell patterns using parts of coconut fronds and shells as islands. Like a subway map, they don’t so much represent distances as they do relationships. The complex and decorative stick charts were often only understood by the person who made them. They were memorised before a voyage by the pilot who would lie on the floor of a canoe to get a sense of swell movement and often lead a squadron of 15 or more boats.

Here's a map of the different Austronesian groups and the hypothesized way they spread.

Their charts allow navigators to be familiar with the wave patterns, so they can navigate by waves and understand how near they are to atolls, islands, land etc. without need the usual cues for navigating.

For a time, scientists and scholars did not appreciate how accurate these were- but eventually they've come to realize that these are incredibly accurate teaching devices that made them some of the most acute navigators of the ocean who were very precisely and accurately documenting wave patterns better than even most modern navigators.