Winds and Currents Drive Sailing Ships

Anyone who knows anything about the Sea, knows that weather ships were driven by winds and currents, and could only go where winds blew them and currents took them. In fact, these wind and sea currents were so important to early seamen that when Matthew Fontaine Maury joined the United States Navy at the end of the 18th-Century, he made his influence felt on navigation all over the world by writing a book that became the foundation of the science of oceanography. In this work he began a practical study of winds and sea currents, and as late as 1951 his charts and science were still in use.

To further show how important winds and currents are even today, despite our enormously powerful shipping capabilities, naval oceanographers use a wide range of technical measuring devices to map the ocean’s currents. Subsurface sifting sondes are set at different depths and are left to drift with the currents for months, even years. Emitting acoustic signals that can be heard for a long distance, they regularly submit their “reports” on where a current has brought them as well as at what speed. Gliders, which are equipped with a small rotor driven by batteries, float along prescribed depths and regions measuring the directions of currents and their speed as well as temperatures, salinity, diverse trace substances, oxygen, and carbon dioxide in the water to aid in understanding currents.

At defined intervals these resurface, transfer their data to satellites, then disappear once more under the water. Observatories and moorings are set down on an ocean floor bed in order to make continuous measurements of the currents. These too are often left alone for weeks or months. In addition, satellites provide a world-wide picture of what is happening on the surface of the oceans. All of this, of course, suggests how important ocean currents are, even today.
Consequently, for Mesoamerican Theorists to try and tell us that Lehi sailed against winds and currents across the Pacific to land in Mesoamerica, it shows how enormously ignorant of ocean and currents they are. When Nephi tells us his ship was “driven forth before the wind” , we ought to believe him and see where winds and current would have taken him from the south Arabian peninsula into the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, which they called Irreantum--many water, then across the Pacific to the Western Hemisphere. The graph below shows these currents, with South America to the far right and New Zealand to the far left. Note the direction the currents flow.
Image: Provided by Oceanweather, Inc., showing the wave height and wave (current) direction. Note that the waves in the upper area, where Mesoamerican Theorists claim Lehi traveled from west to east, actually move from east to west. However, in the bottom of the picture, where Lehi traveled, the 25 to 30 foot swells move from west to east at a speed of about 25 miles per hour along the West Wind Drift