History of Cartography - Pacific Islands

Pacific Islands

Main article: Marshall Islands stick chart

The Polynesian peoples who explored and settled the Pacific islands in the first two millenniums CE used maps to navigate across large distances. A surviving map from the Marshall Islands uses sticks tied in a grid with palm strips representing wave and wind patterns, with shells attached to show the location of islands. Other maps were created as needed using temporary arrangements of stones or shells.

Read more about this topic:  History Of Cartography

Famous quotes containing the words pacific and/or islands:

    I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.
    William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
    —W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)