Keeping the Cart Behind the Horse – Part I

The first step in determining the location of the Land of Promise is we have stated time and time again, is to figure out how Lehi got there in the first place. Now Nephi is quite specific when he tells us the ship he built was “driven forth before the wind” on two occasions (1 Nephi 18:8-9). Also, as has repeatedly been stated, being blow before the wind means that the ship was moving with the winds and ocean currents to cross the “great deep” to the Land of Promise.

Sailing ships “driven forth before the wind” in 600 BC were limited in the direction they could sail, having to follow the winds and currents where blew and drove them forward

Consequently, since we know from where Lehi left (the southern Omani coast on the Arabian Peninsula), then it is simply a matter of following the ocean currents and winds that flow from that location, since that was the direction in which Nephi’s ship was blown and the course he had to have taken.
    There is nothing mysterious about this—nothing that cannot be understood from a common ocean atlas. President Frederick G. Williams of the initial First Presidency, himself a navigator and familiar with sea currents and winds driving ships (he was a navigator of ships on Lake Erie, and the pilot of Oliver Hazard Perry ‘s ship during the War of 1812 on that lake), claims that Lehi, once taking to ship, sailed southeast from Bountiful and landed at 30º south Latitude in Chile.
    While some early church leaders and numerous current theorists claim this was not a revelation, which Williams never claimed it to have been, nor did he claim he learned this from Joseph Smith, the point is that ocean currents and winds blow southward in a curling Gyre in the Indian Ocean. As the westward swing of this current goes southward, it curls toward the southeast and picks up the Southern Ocean, where it runs straight across the Pacific toward the Western Hemisphere.
    Once in the grip of the Humboldt Current, it swings northward along the West Coast of South America, falling from fast speeds down to almost no movement (doldrums) around 30º South Latitude—a factor that would have been unknown in the eastern United States at the time of Williams—is mute proof that such a course not only was possible, but just about the shortest, easiest and safest direction of movement for a sailing ship in 600 BC from Arabia to the Western Hemisphere.
    No currents leave the Arabian Peninsula and move eastward across the Sea of Arabia toward Indonesia, and no currents move eastward through Indonesia’s thousands of islands to the Pacific Ocean. While a small, coastal vessel with a moveable and adjustable sail, such as fishing boats that existed anciently, could make such a voyage through the islands, nothing the size and tonnage of Nephi’s ship could have done so.

Mesoamericanists try to take Lehi eastward across the Pacific, which would have been against all the ocean currents and winds the entire journey, which would not be possible when a ship is “driven forth before the wind”

Yet, in order to meet the claim of John L. Sorenson, and the many Mesoamerican theorists who have weighed in on the subject, Lehi’s course was eastward from the Arabian Peninsula, through Indonesia, and across the Pacific—all against the winds and currents that Nephi said drove his ship. Such a course looks fine on paper, but could not have been accomplished without different motive power—such as oar-driven boats, or modern type of engine-driven vessels.
    Yet, blithely these theorists take Lehi along that path, because it runs straight to the Mesoamerican area between southern Mexico and Central America, where they claim Lehi landed. And from there build an entire Land of Promise model and history of the promised land and the Jaredite kingdom/Nephite nation history.
    However, in the parlance of the Old West: “that’s putting the cart before the horse.” That is, just claiming Lehi went somewhere and then building an entire history in that area of Lehi and his descendants is getting the story ahead of any proof of the feasibility in which one took Lehi from Bountiful to the Land of Promise. Thus, since winds and currents do not blow in that direction, Lehi could not have gone that way, for Nephi makes it quite clear that his ship was driven before the winds.
    When people (theorists and their followers) make such claims, it shows a total lack of knowledge and understanding of what lies behind Nephi’s simple statement. Again, being driven forth before the wind is a term that has only one meaning—that the ship is being blown forward by the winds behind it, which winds also blow or drive the ocean currents. It has ever been so, that those who know little want to claim they know much when they try to marginalize important information.

Nephi’s ship was “driven forth before the wind”

It certainly should be taken as important when Nephi twice states his ship was “driven forth before the wind.” Certainly, one of the important reasons for such a statement is to help future readers to understand that: 1) Nephi build a ship that had sails, 2) that his ship was driven solely by wind power, and 3) that those winds, which also blow and determine the direction of ocean currents, was the motive power of his ship.
    Those who write or state ideas contrary to that simple information seem to think that events just happen any way someone says they do and has no understanding of the fact that our world is governed by laws of physics, motion, and cause and effect that cannot be ignored.
    Naturally, in ages past, it was possible to claim that certain things were neither important, nor had an impact on natural events. Today, however, we know better, since so much has come to the fore front of knowledge and understanding. There was a time when some people thought the world was flat, or that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and as late as 1633 physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei was convicted by the Church in his day of heresy by teaching that the Earth was not the immovable center of the Universe—a sentence that was not reversed and acknowledged by the Catholic Church to be true for 300 years!
    It should be of interest to know that as late as the early 16^th century, even with as much as was understood about sailing at the time by the Spanish who had sailed the Atlantic with certainty, we should never forget the terrible tragedies they encountered when they tried to apply their limited knowledge in attempting to sail the Pacific Ocean.
    In May 1527, Álvaro de Saavedra Cerón was dispatched with two ships by his cousin, Hernan Cortes de Monroy y Pizarro, the First Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, from Mexico to sail west across the Pacific to the Philippine Islands. After conducting his business there, Saavedra attempted to sail back to Mexico, crossing the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines to Mexico; however, he failed at this because the currents and winds moved in the opposite direction.

Orange arrow the course Saavedra took from Mexico to the Philippines; Yellow arrows the course he tried to take to return, but failed because he sailed into the winds

He lost one ship fighting the winds, and after four years of failed attempts, died in his final effort to cross the Pacific back to Mexico in 1531. His crew finally sailed with the winds in the opposite direction around the world and approached Mesoamerica from the east, where only eight men of his original crew reaching their destination.
    It took thirty-four years before the Spanish realized they had to go north to pick up the return current going east across the Pacific and back toward North America on the northern arm of the North Pacific Gyre, which they could then drop down and sail southward into Mexico.

To return to Mexico from the Philippines, they had to go northward (Green arrow) toward the northern branch or arm of the Gyre in order to pick up the current going east

These later voyages taken by the famed Manilla Galleons (Galeón de Manila), which were the Spanish trading ships that made round-trip voyages once or twice per year (1565-1815) across the Pacific Ocean from the port of Acapulco to Manila, which were both part of New Spain at the time, exchanging colonial silver for Chinese goods.
(See the next post, “Keeping the Cart Behind the Horse – Part II,” regarding placing events both in their proper order as well as not looking for results before understanding the facts involved)