Where the Mulekites, that is, those who took Mulek, no doubt as a baby, (see last post), and traveled to the sea. Some would suggest that he left through the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, but such a thought seems unrealistic. At the time of Mulek leaving Jerusalem, the city was about to fall to the Babylonians who were not known for their morality or forgiveness. The physical destruction wrought by the Babylonian troops was tremendous. The Temple, the palace, and all of the houses of Jerusalem were burnt, the walls of the city were torn down, and the remaining treasures from the Temple were taken to Babylon (II Kings 25:8-17).
Archaeological evidence shows that the destruction extended beyond Jerusalem to as far as Ein Gedi in the east, Arad in the south, and Lachish in the west. These cities, as well as Ramat Rachel, Bet Shemesh, and Bet Tzur were reduced to subsistence level villages. The population was diminished through military action and forced relocation; II Kings and Jeremiah differ on the numbers, but they both present a sense of economic and political disruption.
Consequently, it is unlikely that Mulek and his people would have stayed in the area, or even tried to escape from a local port. Thus, they would not have chosen to go west to the Mediterranean Sea, since the Babylonians covered the entire land of Palestine during and after the siege of Jerusalem. To spirit a Jew out of the area via the sea would have been both dangerous and foolhardy.
The best way to get someone out of Jerusalem without detection would have been to go south, as Lehi had done ten years before. The path down to the Red Sea would have been open, for the Babylonians had withdrawn from their Egyptian campaign after failing to add that land and people to their expanding Empire.
As we have suggested in other posts, especially about the Jaredites, and stated more fully in the book, “Who Really Settled Mesoamerica,” the Lord tends to have a conservative nature about how he orders the affairs of his people. The path to the area Lehi called Bountiful along the coast of Irreantum was well established by the time of Mulek. The Lehi colony would have left planted crops growing at least in the area of the Valley of Lemuel, and the road to the coast was along the King’s Highway that stretched from Oman to Assyria, over which camel caravans traveled to bring frankincense northward.
And at Bountiful, among the remains of crops planted and animals left from the days of the Jaredites, of which the Lehi colony benefitted, so too would the Mulekites have benefitted a year or two later. So too would the trees and wood for building a ship been available to Mulek’s people as it was for Lehi’s family. And the path across the sea as known and exact as it had been for Lehi.
Thus, when the Muleite ship reached the Land of Promise and sailed in out of the current somewhere along the Chilean coast, it could have continued up the coastal waters to around the area of present-day Lima without endangering being swept back into the South Pacific Current that curved outward along the bulge of Peru and back into the Pacific, eventually to curve downard into the Polynesian islands.
At about the 13º south latitude the coastal currents (Humboldt Current) sweep in against the bulge of Peru and are halted by the upswelling of the deep water moving north from the Antarctic area along this Peruvian or Humboldt Current. At this point the Mulekites landed along a shoreline a little south of present day Callao in an area archaeologists have named Pachacamac, the name of the one universal God of the ancient Peruvians.(See the next post “The Mulekites—Who Were They? Part III,” to see about the beginning of Zarahemla and the Mulekite nation)
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