Daily Photo: The Maritime Museum in Auckland

I stood looking out across the basin contemplating my next move. I’d spent some time in the Maritime Museum in Auckland, where, among the many fascinating exhibits, I came across something called a stick chart, used by the people of the Marshall Islands to navigate the Pacific Ocean dating back more than 2,000 years. I have to say, there’s something quietly astonishing about standing in front of such a delicate, lattice-like construction, made from coconut fronds and cowrie shells, which somehow manages to represent an entire ocean.

To be fair, it didn’t look like a map in any sense I was taught to read. There were no outlines of landmasses, no drawn borders or familiar grid lines. Instead, it was more like an architectural drawing of the ocean itself. The curved and intersecting strips represented the movement of ocean swells, showing how waves bent, met and changed direction around the low-lying atolls. The little shells marked the islands, providing reference points within this rather ingenious network of ocean movements.

It was one of those exhibits that became more intriguing the longer I stared at it. The more I looked, the more complicated it seemed, and the more I appreciated the extraordinary knowledge behind it.

What makes these charts even more remarkable is that Marshallese navigators never actually took them out to sea. They memorised the patterns on shore, leaving the charts behind and relying instead on their knowledge and senses to read the swells, currents and subtle movements of the ocean from the hull of a canoe. No GPS, no compass and certainly no Google Maps. Just generations of accumulated knowledge, an intimate understanding of the ocean and an extraordinary ability to find their way across thousands of kilometres of open water.