What is that image in the PBIN Logo?

For centuries before Europeans "discovered" the Pacific Ocean, indigenous peoples navigated across vast expanses of open ocean in simple canoes. Once thought to have been happenstance occurrences, these voyages, we now know, were carefully planned, deliberately carried out, and repeated many times. How did the travelers manage to find their way across great distances, without any technological devices to assist them, and then make their way back home again?

Much of the navigator's art among peoples in the Pacific was based on an elaborate oral tradition - there was no written language among any of the Polynesian, Micronesian, or Melanesian peoples. But they used very simple devices as memory aids and teaching tools. A simple lattice of split bamboo, with white shells attached to represent islands, was one such navigational aid.

While appearing simple, these "stick charts" are actually rather sophisticated in that they do not depict the islands in their fixed geographic relationship to one another; instead, they show the islands in relation to the prevailing winds and ocean currents that would carry a canoe between them. In addition, the navigator was trained to read the natural world of the Pacific - cloud formations, reflections of the sky from the water's surface, the faint movements in the water due to currents, and even the sound of waves against the canoe hull - to assist in way-finding across open ocean and out of sight of land.

In light of this historical method for finding one's way across a large expanse of water and sky, the simple "stick chart" seems an appropriate logo for the Pacific Basin Information Node. Hawai'i and the US-administered islands in the Pacific are tiny specks of land, scattered across an ocean that covers more of the Earth's surface than does the continental United States. Like those ancient navigators, biologists and resource managers must make their way through rich seas of biological information about the unique life forms that inhabit the islands and waters of the Pacific Basin.

written by Dr. George Staples, B.P. Bishop Museum