Kajoor Ri Majel

The Kajoor Ri Majel, better known as the Marshallese, are the Austronesian people of the Marshall Islands, two coral-atoll chains, eastern Ratak and western Ralik, speaking Marshallese, a Micronesian language. Austronesian seafarers settled the atolls from around the second millennium BC, and archaeology shows villages on Majuro and Kwajalein by the first century.

They lived under ranked chiefs with a paramount chief over each chain, and mastered navigation, sailing outrigger canoes by stars and swells recorded on shell-and-stick charts.

Alonso de Salazar sighted the islands in 1526 and Álvaro de Saavedra landed in 1528, but regular contact began after British ships under Gilbert and Marshall passed through in 1788, giving the islands their European name after Marshall. Whalers came from the 1820s; the Globe mutiny at Mili in 1824 and clashes in the 1830s left the Marshallese independent but wary of foreign ships by 1837.