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

Continued for the last post, regarding the dogged insistence by Heartland and North America theorists to insist that Lehi sailed around Africa.
    When it comes to claiming Lehi sailed around Africa—crossing through the sea of storms that was the graveyard of more than 3000 ships, and the area of the worst sailing weather known with its constant storms, cross-winds, and converging currents—Heartland theorists are completely unrealistic.
    Obviously, Nephi and his brothers would have had extreme difficulty because of their novice knowledge of sailing, to have made such a voyage. In fact, this course around Africa was so dangerous, and such a scourge to Portuguese mariners in the 1400s, that Luís de Camões, the national poet of Portugal and the Portuguese language's greatest poet, penned an epic poem, Os Lusiadas (The Lusiad or Discovery of India), first printed in 1572, when he wrote about the Flying Dutchman, a sailing ship crewed by tormented and damned ghostly sailors who were doomed forever to beat their way through the adjacent waters without ever succeeding in rounding the headland of the Cape because of the threatening storms.

The Cape’s storm clouds, represented by "Adamastor," the Spirit of the Cape, the hideous phantom of unearthly pallor, was known in every maritime port along the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, and became a symbol of the forces of nature Portuguese sailors had to overcome when trying to round the Cape of Storms. These infamously dangerous waters increased in such notoriety and fear that in the 1865 opera L’Africaine about Vasco da Gama trying to round the Cape, the Gerkan opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer has the slave Nelusko sing a song about Adamastor while he deliberately steers the ship into a storm and it sinks.
    Adamaster became well known as the scary mythical figure who resided in the Indian Ocean, and made life very difficult for the sailors who dared enter his realms by going around the Cape of Storms. This giant was an inspiration for Portuguese authors who wrote about him in their works. To our beloved poet, the meeting with this gigantic force of nature represented the Portuguese ability to overcome fear and conquer the unknown, no matter how dangerous and intimidating.
    The point is, the dangers were, and still are, extreme where the warm, swift, and strong traveling Agulhas Current reaches its termination between two subtropical gyres, creating unusual conditions for inter-ocean exchanges of water kinematic masses and kinetic energy between them, the latter being the highest fluctuating current in the Southern Ocean, creating huge mesoscale eddies.
    At the same time, the cold Benguela Current moving up from the south collides with the Agulhas Current, forcing the latter’s retroflection (turning back on itself). This current has a transport of 100 Sverdrups (1 Sverdrup is equivalent to 1 million cubic metres per second, which is 264,000,000 U.S. Gallons), and more than twice that of the Kuroshio Current—it travels at such speed, the momentum of the current overcomes the vorticity balance holding it to the topography and the current leaves the shelf.
    By comparison the Indian-Pacific Ocean throughfare is 12 Sv, Humboldt (Peruvisn) Current is 18 Sv, Benguela Current 18 Sv, Gulf Stream is 32 Sv, Kuroshio Current 48 Sv, Antarctic Circumpolar Current (Southern Ocean) 125 Sv, reaching 135 Sv through the Drake Passage, and the Florida Current at 150 Sv.

Yellow Circle: The Retroflection where the Agulhas Current is turned back on itself, forming the Recirculation Region, counter currents, eddies, and the Agulhas Ring, all of which creates the tempestuous weather found there

The area of the yellow circler above, just off the southern coast of Africa, where the Agulhas Current hits the rising Buguela Current and reflects back on itself, leads to very high evaporation rates. Here, such high latent heat fluxes lead to increased low-level advection of moisture onshore and local intensification of storm systems.
    The Agulhas Current Air Sea Exchange Experiment, which showed that about 5 times as much water vapor is transferred to the atmosphere above the 50 to 62-mile-wide core of the current, far more than neighboring waters. Using NCEP reanalyses, Meteosat, and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission data, along with local station and radiosonde observations, continually measure this area.
   Here heavy rainfall occurs in two widely separated locations, along with tornadoes when the moisture flux transects through the storm region and backward trajectories of air parcels create low-level onshore flow of moisture from the Agulhas Current region, which plays a significant role in the storm evolution.

The route of Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500 AD, from Lisbon, Portugal, to Calicut, India and back. He left with 13 ships and returned with four

Again, the point of this is to show that while Portuguese sailing ships found their way around the African cape, it took many years and the loss of many ships—it was and still is a dangerous route, especially for sailing ships dependent upon the wind and currents. As an example Pedro Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese nobleman, explorer and navigator, and the first European to see Brazil, was sent on an expedition to India by King Manuel I of Portugal. He left with 13 ships on March 9, 1500, following the route of Vasco da Gama, and sighted the land now called Brazil on April 22, 1500, claiming it for Portugal and naming it the "Island of the True Cross." King Manuel renamed this land Holy Cross, but it was later renamed Brazil, after a type of dyewood called pau-brasil found there.
    Cabral stayed in Brazil for 10 days and then continued on his way to India—a trip, fraught with untold dangers, including unbelievable storms, and numerous shipwrecks (at the Cape of Good Hope) that saw him lose coming and going around the Cape nine of his 13 ships. In addition, fifty of his men were killed during an attack from Muslim traders in Calicut, India, who did not want competition on their spice routes.
    However, even if Lehi had gone this way, he would not have landed on the west coast of the Americas, which is where Mormon said he landed (Land of First Inheritance), which should eliminate this route entirely from consideration.
    Yet, it does not. The Heartland theorists continue to cling to this almost impossible feat by Nephi and his brothers, none of which had ever been to sea, nor know anything about sailing, yet are expected to have negotiated a route through some of the most dangerous waters on the planet as though they were long-time mariners with such necessary experience. But they were not. Few members of the House of Israel, at any time, were involved in matters of the Sea. Even at the time of Christ, fishermen were on the Sea of Galilee (a large lake in northern Israel), but not the Mediterranean Sea.
(See the next post, “Let’s End This Silly Idea of Lehi Rounding Africa and into the Atlantic Ocean – Part III,” regarding the dogged insistence by Heartland and North America theorists to insist that Lehi sailed around Africa)