Voyage examines how Marshallese sailors read waves to navigate

When leaving an atoll of the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific, Alson Kelen prefers to sail after sunset. It’s like navigating with his eyes closed — allowing him to feel the up, down and sideways movement of every swell.

“That’s how the Marshallese navigate,” he said. “They navigate with their stomach.”

For thousands of years, Marshallese navigators used traditional wave-piloting techniques to travel vast expanses of ocean. Wave piloting is the art of feeling and reading the swells and waves that hit and emanate from the region’s atolls. After a lifetime of studying these and other patterns, navigators pass a test devised by their chiefs to become a ri meto, or person of the sea.

In the mid-1940s through the 1950s, nuclear testing by the U.S. military displaced some Indigenous populatio