Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands were settled around two thousand years ago by Micronesian voyagers who became among the finest open-ocean navigators in the world, reading swells and the way waves bend around islands, and recording those patterns on lattice "stick charts" made of palm ribs and shells. Society was organised around matrilineal clans and paramount chiefs, the iroij.

European ships passed from the sixteenth century, and Spain claimed the islands without settling them. Germany bought them in 1885 and ran the atolls as a copra trade. Japan took the islands during the First World War, held them under a League of Nations mandate, and fortified several atolls heavily. In 1944 US forces captured Kwajalein and Enewetak in fierce fighting, and the islands passed to the United States.

From 1946 to 1958 the United States used Bikini and Enewetak atolls for 67 nuclear tests, including the 1954 Castle Bravo detonation, its largest ever. Whole communities were moved off their home atolls, some were exposed to fallout, and parts of the islands remain contaminated and uninhabited; compensation and resettlement are unresolved to this day. The Marshall Islands adopted a constitution in 1979 and became a sovereign state in free association with the United States under a Compact that took effect in 1986, joining the United Nations in 1991. The US still funds much of the budget and operates a missile-defence test range at Kwajalein.

Land in the Marshall Islands is held through the mother's line, in clan parcels called weto, and traditional authority still rests with the iroij. Kinship obligations run deep: sharing food and helping relatives are expected, and a person's standing comes from generosity rather than accumulation.

Christianity, brought by Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century, is now central to life. Sundays are for church and rest, Gospel Day is a major holiday, and church choirs and fundraising events are a big part of the social calendar. A child's first birthday, the kemem, is celebrated with a large feast to which the whole community is invited.

Older skills survive alongside imported life: outrigger-canoe building and sailing, wave-and-star navigation, and fine weaving of pandanus and coconut fibre into mats, baskets, and fans. Manit Day sets aside time each year for these traditions, with canoe races, weaving displays, and demonstrations of local food preparation.

About three-quarters of Marshallese live in two crowded urban centres: Majuro, the capital, a ribbon of land enclosing a large lagoon, and Ebeye, a tiny, extremely densely packed island next to the US base at Kwajalein, where many residents work. The rest live on the outer atolls, largely by subsistence fishing and growing breadfruit, taro, pandanus, and coconut.

The cash economy depends heavily on US Compact funding, payments for the Kwajalein range, fishing-licence fees from foreign fleets, a large open ship registry, and remittances. Many thousands of Marshallese have moved to the United States, where the Compact lets them live and work; the town of Springdale, Arkansas, has one of the largest communities.

Imported rice, flour, sugar, and tinned meat have displaced much of the traditional diet, and the Marshall Islands now has some of the world's highest rates of diabetes. Rising seas, saltwater flooding of gardens and freshwater lenses, and drought on the northern atolls are pressing, everyday concerns rather than distant threats.

Marshallese food starts with the reef and the ocean — tuna, reef fish, octopus, clams, and lobster — eaten grilled, raw with lime and coconut, or in soups. Breadfruit is the main starch, roasted or boiled or fermented into a paste called bwiro; pandanus, taro, and arrowroot fill out the traditional table.

Coconut appears at every stage: the water to drink, the flesh grated for cream, sprouted coconut ("spongy" iu) eaten as a snack, and the sap tapped for a sweet drink. Chicken and pork are cooked for feasts, often in an earth oven. The coconut crab, a large land crab that feeds on fallen coconuts, is a prized delicacy.

Everyday eating in Majuro and Ebeye now leans heavily on imported staples — white rice, ramen, tinned corned beef and fish, and fried chicken — and on a few restaurants and takeaways serving a mix of American, Chinese, and Pacific dishes.

Bikini Atoll, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the country's most extraordinary destination when dive operations run: a lagoon holding a "ghost fleet" of warships sunk in the 1946 tests, including the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and the Japanese battleship Nagato, dived from a live-aboard boat out of Majuro.

Majuro itself has the long, palm-backed Laura Beach at the atoll's western end, the Alele Museum with its collection of navigation stick charts, and lagoon snorkelling. Arno Atoll, a short boat ride away, and Mili Atoll, reachable by light plane, offer quiet beaches, clear water, and Second World War wreckage and relics.

The wider draw is the ocean: some of the Pacific's least-visited reefs, big pelagic fish for sport anglers, and the sheer scale of Kwajalein, the largest lagoon in the world — though access to Kwajalein is tightly controlled because of the US installation.