Let’s End This Silly Idea of Lehi Rounding Africa and into the Atlantic Ocean – Part I

It is amazing that someone will look at a map and say, “Well, that is where Lehi went to land in the Americas.” However, just because a certain course looks plausible on a map, does not mean it is in reality—or more specifically, that it was in 600 BC with a ship’s crew who had never been to sea before and were not mariners, knowing exactly where they were going or what they might encounter.
    With all this sudden surge in claiming Lehi took a course from the Indian Ocean around Africa into the Atlantic, it should be noted that such a course would have been next to impossible for a “newbie” crew in 600 BC. After all, experienced mariners as late as the Age of Sail wrote of this course around Africa from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic with great, and often fearful, concern.
    On the one hand, the course from west to east, with the winds and currents of the Southern Ocean were negotiable—as shown in a statement by one old time mariner who wrote:

“Who would have dreamed of running south to the latitude of 45º, six hundred miles below the tip of Africa, and there of swinging to the eastward and crossing the Indian Ocean in that low latitude, but this is the course I’ve always followed, as a commonplace of nautical knowledge; and the secret of it is easy to explain. In the latitude of 45º you’ve crossed the zone of variables that lies below the southeast trades, and reached the ‘roaring forties,’ where a gale of wind is blowing almost continually from the west. When you’ve reached this zone, you haul away to port and run before the gale; day after day you reel off the miles, often scudding under three lower topsails, the main-deck flooded with the tops of green seas. You could circle the world in this latitude, being hurled like a bullet, never changing your course, carrying the same gale—these are the Westerlies, where you ‘run your easting down.’ You use them as long as you want them, then swing north and leave them to blow on their eternal way” (Lincoln Colcord, An Instrument of the Gods, and Other Stories of the Sea, Macmillan Co., New York, 1922, p 274) .
    However, and this is the crux of the matter, that moving in the opposite direction, from the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean (the course claimed for Lehi’s voyage), the facts are quite the opposite. Along this southern coast of Africa, today called the Cape of Good Hope (or the actual southern point, Cape Agulhas), was originally called the “Cabo das Tormentas,” or the “Cape of Storms” and one of the most dangerous areas in all of antiquitous sailing. It was called “The Graveyard of Ships” by the first Portuguese sailors and then all the other early mariners who made those attempts.

Cape of Good Hope and Cape of Agulhas at the southern tip of Africa; the Agulhas Bank, a broad, shallow continental shelf extending south of these two capes for 160-miles before falling steeply to the abyssal plain

Cape Agulhas (Cape of Needles), which is the southern-most cape or rocky headland at the eastern end of the western Cape of Good Hope (Cape of Storms), starts the rounding of Africa form the Indian Ocean. This route covers four basic areas in the rounding: Cape Agulhas is the eastern boundary current of the southwest Indian Ocean, with Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of the Cape Peninsula, and the western boundary (where a ship coming from the west around Africa begins its first turn more eastward than southward), with Quoin Point and Danger Point in between. Cape Hangklip is across False Bay from the Cape of Good Hope, but not really a way point on this journey.

The sources of the Agulhas Current are the East Madagascar Current (25 Sv), the Mozambique Current (5 Sv) and a recirculated part of the south-west Indian subgyre south of Madagascar, and flows down the east coast of Africa from 27°S to 40°S. It is narrow, swift and strong and considered the largest western boundary current in the world ocean.

    The net transport of this current is directed by the topography as it follows the continental shelf from Maputo to the tip of the Angulhas Bank (155 miles south of Cape Agulhas). At this point, the momentum of the current overcomes the vorticity balance holding the current to the topography and the current leaves the shelf, reaching a maximum transport near the Agulhas Bank, giving the current core an average width of 21 miles.

    The swiftness of this current effects the ocean surrounding the western entrance around Africa and entrance into the Atlantic! Of course to modern sailing ships of today, this is nowhere as critical as it in the past and especially in Lehi’s time, with fixed sails and dependent on wind for movement.  
    As this Agulhas Current flows south along the African east coast, it tends to bulge inshore frequently, a deviation from the Agulhas’ normal path which causes the current to meander. These bulges are occasionally followed by a much larger offshore bulge, known as Natal pulses, which move along the coast at 12 miles per day, with the pules bulging up to 75 miles from the current's mean position. That is, while the current passes here at 21 miles offshore, the meanders reach 76 miles offshore, broadening from 55 miles in width to 78 miles, inducing a strong inshore counter-current—this causes large-scale cyclonic meanders known as Natal pulses that form along the continental shelf on the South African east-coast (i.e. the eastern Agulhas Bank off Natal).

As these pulses move along the coast on the Agulhas Bank, they pinch off Agulhas rings from the current, such a ring shedding causes cyclonic vorticity belts around the Loop Current causing vortex ring instability resulting in cyclones and counter-clockwise anticyclones.eddies

Now, when this warm, swift Agulhas current reaches the so-called “division line” between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, it collides with the cold Benguela Current flowing up the west coast of Africa, which does not, by the way, originate from Antarctic waters in the South Atlantic Ocean as one would suppose, but from upwelling of water from the cold depths of the Atlantic Ocean against the west coast of the continent. The two currents do not "meet" anywhere along the south coast of Africa, however, as the Agulhas Current retroflects, i.e., turns back upon itself, due to sheer interaction with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current or “West Wind Drift.” Thus, the Agulhas becomes the Agulhas Return Current, rejoining the Indian Ocean Gyre, which automatically turns back upon itself and back into the Indian Ocean any drift voyage, or antiquitus sailing vessel “driven forth before the wind.”
    This coming together of these currents off the southern coast of Africa, causes an enormous filament of cold, upwelled water which extends hundreds of mile from shore in a mesoscale field of eddies and coherent vortices and cascades of other structures such as filaments, squirts and spirals of three-dimensional structures that reach down into the pycnocline. We mention all of this to suggest the uneven and tumultuous character of this ocean as it rounds the Cape of Africa, which has led to enormous casualty of ships and crews beginning in the early 1400s.

Which course seems the most likely? In addition, the Blue Arrow course is not only much safer, but is much faster, and shorter as well because of the curvature off the Earth, putting the ship in the Southern Ocean the entire distance across the Pacific Ocean

Some historians count over 3000 ships going down there in the early days of sailing, and even some into the modern era of steel ships and diesel engines. It is where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet, and where huge swells move northward from the Southern Ocean across the sailing lanes around the Cape, creating enormous storms, extremely rough waters, eddies and cross-currents.
    It is amazing that anyone would suggest that Lehi sailed around Africa, nor does the experience of the Phoenician sailors play a comparative role here, since they put in at night, hugged the coast, and stopped from time to time to plant and harvest crops.
    The point is, Lehi’s voyage was a unique event conducted in a unique manner with no experienced mariners on board, and under the most unique of circumstances, that of God showing them how to build the ship and where to go, via the Liahona. However, the kind of skills needed to handle a sailing ship in tumultuous waters where so many experienced mariners have failed, with the sinking of thousands of ships in this area, makes these theorists’ views difficult and basically impossible to defend.
(See the next post, “Let’s End This Silly Idea of Lehi Rounding Africa and into the Atlantic Ocean – Part II,” regarding the dogged insistence by Heartland and North America theorists to insist that Lehi sailed around Africa)