Who Were the Phoenicians? Part II

Taking nothing away from the Phoenician sailing ability, there is simply nothing in history to suggest that they ever left the Mediterranean and sailed out into deep water. They simple lacked the ship design and sturdy construction to accomplish such a fete.
A typical Phoenician ship design of the first millennium B.C. Such ships moved across the Mediterranean, with longer and larger ships of a similar design used for their naval vessels. None of which could have withstood the constant pounding of a deep water ocean.

The only two recorded occasions of even leaving the protection and security of the inland ocean, the Mediterranean, were coastal voyages. To claim they took Mulek and those with him out into the Atlantic Ocean and braved the deep sea in coastal vessels, without the astrolabe (invented in 600 A.D.,but not used by mariners until the 15th century), the compass (invented in China in 247 B.C., but not used in navigation until the 11th century), quadrant, not invented until 1653, the sextant invented in 1731, or a chronograph—not even available in Columbus’ time and the reason he did not know exactly where he landed among the numerous islands of the Caribbean, and was so many degrees off in his calculation of his return voyage that he nearly missed Spain all together.

To understand the importance of this prior to the knowledge of these instruments and in most reader’s lifetime the common understanding of GPS (Global Positioning Satellites), to determine a position on the Earth's surface, it was necessary (and still is) and sufficient to know the latitude, longitude and altitude. Altitude can be ignored for ships at sea level, but even so, until the mid 1750s accurate navigation at sea out of sight of land was an unsolved problem due to the difficulty in calculating longitude.

Navigators could determine their latitude by measuring the sun's angle at noon (when it reached its highest point in the sky, or culmination). But in Columbus’ time, to find longitude at sea was merely guesswork. Not even Galileo Galilei’s method a century later of observing regular celestial motions based on watching Jupiter's natural satellites, was possible at sea due to the ship's motion--nor did they have any other way to determine a time standard that would work aboard a ship. The Lunar Distance Method, initially proposed by Johannes Werner in 1514, was developed in parallel with the marine chronometer. The Dutch scientist Gemma Frisius was the first to propose the use of a chronometer to determine longitude in 1530.

Thus, Columbus nearly missed his return destination to Spain because he was several degrees off in his “guessing” of these calculations. It has often been cited that the only reason Columbus succeeded in his initial voyage was in his absolute belief the earth’s circumference was much small than it is, and that the orient lay only 2400 miles across the sea, which allowed him to think he could reach India in a short enough time not to run out of supplies. And also his belief that he was pre-ordained to discover the Western Hemisphere (see 1 Nephi 13:12)

So for Hugh Nibley, Sorenson, and others to so flippantly suggest that the Mulekites were guided to the Land of Promise by Phoenician sailors is not only out of the question, it is absolutely absurd.

People of today so often neglect to think about situations that existed in ancient times. Not only do we have to deal with winds and currents, knowing that once leaving the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians in 600 B.C. would have to know to travel south to the Canary Islands, a distance of just over 800 miles. At about 90 miles per day, that southerly direction would have taken 9 days of travel to the south, away from their direction across the Atlantic. Columbus, once reaching the Canaries, traveled another 700 miles southward to the Cape Verde Islands, where he finally turned west. About 1500 miles, or about 17 days in a southerly direction. How would the Phoenicians, who had never been further from the coast of Africa than within sight of its land, or about 25 to 30 miles distance, know to travel 400 miles off the coast to these islands—how would they even know how to find these islands, or the Canaries about 380 miles off the African coast?

2000 years later, Columbus believed incorrectly that the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was 2300 miles, but others believed correctly that the earth was much larger than Columbus thought, and that the distance from the Canaries to Japan was about 12,200 miles—and that no ship available in the 15th century could carry enough food and fresh water for such a journey.

To believe, and promote an idea that Phoenician sailors could have made such a voyage without significant and extensive divine intervention, is being both naive and gullible. Nor would they have trusted in any divine guidance, as Lehi and Nephi did, for they were pagans and extremely superstitious as were all mariners.

(See the next post, “Who Were the Phoenicians? Part III,” for their sailing ability and whether or not they would have sailed outside the Gates of Hercules—the Straits of Gibraltar—and into the Atlantic Ocean)