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

Continued from the previous post, regarding the dogged insistence by Heartland and North America theorists to insist that Lehi sailed around Africa and across the Atlantic to the south or east coast of what is now the United States.

The Agulhas Current as it retroflects (to turn or redirect back upon itself) as it nears the cold waters of the Benguela Current coming up from the Antarctic, creating huge eddies or rings

It is easy to see that if this was the area that Nephi’s ship encountered the storm, he could hardly say that “there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters for the space of three days…And on the fourth day, which we had been driven back, the tempest began to be exceedingly sore” (1 Nephi 18:113-14, emphasis added). In the Agulhas current, if a sailing ship “driven forth before the wind” hit a current and drove them off course, as Nephi claims, then the direction of the storm force would not be back to the north (the way they had come), for that would be against a very strong southward moving current. However, such a current would carry the ship to the east, and not back upon the waters for the space of four days (11 Nephi 18:14). If his ship was not driven along the current, then it would have been driven into the rocks along the cape and gone to the bottom as happened with thousands of others.
   It also might be of interest to know that the storm Nephi describes, that he and his brothers would have never before seen and most likely never heard about, such storms, in the Indian Ocean are called “severe tropical cyclones.” While hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are all the same weather phenomenon, scientists call such storms by different names depending on where they occur.  As an example, in the north Indian Ocean, they are called “severe cyclonic forms,” but in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, they carry the name “tropical cyclones.” To be classified as such, winds need to reach speeds of at least 74 miles per hour, if they exceed 111 miles per hour, they are upgraded to an “intense hurricane.” If one reaches 150 mph, it is upgraded to an “supertyphoon,” and if it exceeds 155 mph, it is referred to as a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale—the strongest storms ever known. This is readily apparent at sea, where winds can reach speeds of up to 160 miles per hour.
    The cause is when heat and water vapor coming off the warm pool generate thunderstorms so powerful and towering that their influence extends out of the tropics to the jet streams that blow across the middle latitudes. As the warm pool shifts back and forth along the Equator, the wavy paths of the jet streams shift north and south—which changes the tracks that storms follow across the continents. An El Niño, as an example tends to push drenching storms over the southern U.S. and Peru while visiting drought and fire on Australia. In a La Niña the rains flood Australia and fail in the American Southwest and Texas—and in even more distant places like East Africa.

Storm front forming at sea

Storms appear to be worse at sea because it provides more water vapor in the atmosphere than the land. Summer temperatures over open ocean gives rise to temperature, warms up the water and pumps heat into big storms, adding buoyancy that causes them to grow in size and power, which in turn creates more severe thunderstorms. To understand how a storm at sea can suddenly arise, as Nephi explains, we first need to understand that a jet stream is a fast flowing, narrow, meandering air current in the atmosphere that forms high in the upper troposphere between two air masses of very different temperatures.
    Even though this atmospheric wind "tries" to flow from high pressure to low pressure, the turning of the Earth causes the air flow to turn to the right (in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere). This causes the jet stream, a river of air with wind speeds often exceeding 100 mph and peaking over 200 mph, flows around the air masses, rather than directly from one to the other.
    Since colder air is more dense than warmer air, an air pressure difference between them is created at any altitude. And if the warm and cold air masses are quite deep, higher altitudes in the atmosphere experience progressively larger air pressure differences. The altitude at which the winds are strongest is considered to be the jet stream level, so the strongest jet stream winds occurring between air masses having the largest temperature differences over the deepest layer of the troposphere, which can descend to any level, even the tops of a mountains.

The Jet Streams steer the oceans low pressure systems, but are highly complex and multi-layered living dynamic systems barely understood, but are affected by sun activity, ocean temperatures, the Great Ocean Conveyor and volcanic activity

 

All of this is controlled by air movement, ocean and air temperatures, and the northern or southern rotation of the planet. When a jet stream becomes stalled or trapped over a general area, it can create strong differences in temperatures which lead to severe weather conditions, heavy rainfall and winds that churn about creating the cyclone or hurricane, or typhoon. This can happen quite suddenly to the average person who is not adept at reading the signs in the heavens (or instruments today).
    Such would appear to have been the case as Nephi said, “there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest” (1 Nephi 18:13). And as happens when a jet stream gets stuck over an area, there is one thunderstorm after another that sucks up the warm, humid air from the ocean and can move it hundreds of miles along its path, dumping water as it goes. When Nephi said, “after we had been driven back upon the waters for the space of four days, my brethren began to see that the judgments of God were upon them, and that they must perish save that they should repent of their iniquities; wherefore, they came unto me, and loosed me” (1 Nephi 18:15).
    For those who have never been in a type of severe storm that never lets up for four straight days, it can become frightening, with no end in sight. It is not like the downpours most of us have experienced for a few hours, then is over. Such would have been the type of storm that Nephi described, so severe that it ended up frightening these hardened older brothers and their cohorts into succumbing to their younger brother whom they had grown to hate because of his preferential position among them.
    Such would have been the type of weather in going around the Cape had they done so, and certainly not something they could have handled, especially since it would have taken days even a week to transit the Cape in such a storm. However, the reason and point for all this is to show that such a weather front as described, is far more likely in warm water areas, or tropical seas, such as the Indian Ocean toward the north, not as far down as the Cape of Africa.
    It is also unbelievable that anyone would think an ocean-going vessel like the one Nephi built could have sailed from either the North Atlantic up the St. Lawrence River or from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River or from the Atlantic seaboard up one of the numerous inland waters (rivers) off the eastern seaboard and get to any of the Great Lakes, or even within hundreds miles of one.

On a flat map, it looks like the (Red Line) course around Africa and across the Atlantic  to North America is shorter than than the (Blue Line) course down across the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and up to Chile; However, the Earth is curved and the distance around the Southern Ocean is far less than around the Equator, resulting in the Pacific course much shorter than the Atlantic course

Obviously, whoever thinks that isn't knowledgeable of the makeup of the U.S. interwater way system that the Corps of Engineers began work on in the early 1800s that eventually cleared these waterways, built locks and channels, diverted entire systems and made it possible for an ocean going vessel like Nephi's ship to reach past Montreal on the St. Lawrence and beyond Baton Rouge on the Mississippi, and until the Erie Canal was built no vessel of any kind could reach the Great Lakes. Reality always trumps peoples' opinions, no matter how smart people think they are. Nor did Lehi land along the coast of the Atlantic or the Gulf and walk to the Great Lakes area (or the Heartland areas) since he was old and feeble at the time they reached the Land of Promise and Nephi had feared he was on his death bed the final stages of the ocean voyage. As Nephi put it: "and my parents being stricken in years, and having suffered much grief because of their children, they were brought down, yea, even upon their sick-beds" (1 Nephi 18:17).
    It is highly unlikely Lehi went anywhere away from the landing site. As Nephi wrote: "And it came to pass that after we had sailed for the space of many days we did arrive at the promised land; and we went forth upon the land, and did pitch our tents; and we did call it the promised land" (1 Nephi 18:23). So given all that, how do you claim Lehi, Nephi and the others all got to the West Sea of the Great Lakes area (or the Heartland people think he got to Nauvoo/Zarahemla, Iowa area) to land?
    So why don’t we put to bed this silly notion that Lehi sailed around Africa, across the Atlantic, and landed in North America. There is no way that could have happened in 600 BC, let alone by a novice crew with no experience at sailing.