Identifying the Land Northward – Part III

Continued from the previous post as we continue with a look at the Jaredite Land Northward in South America:

The Jaredite Barges would have been driven into the shore where the coastal waters run into the Santa Elena Peninsula

 

As the barges moved to the surface in the upwelling current, they would have been drawn toward the west, heading directly into the center of the 90-mile long Santa Elena Peninsula where the ocean currents would have drawn them into shore, very likely somewhere between Chanduy and the Playas.

It is interesting that critics of this landing claim that the eight barges, without sails and dependent strictly on wind and ocean currents, would have traveled tens of thousands of miles and yet all landed in the same place.  Yet flotsam found along a beach where ocean currents touch, show debris from widely diverse places or origin. Besides, beyond the Santa Elena point, the surf is choppy and rough and would have been very difficult in the barges had they landed further north.

No doubt the currents would have brought them into the peninsula somewhere between Mar Bravo beach, where the waves are strong toward shore, and eastward all the way to the Engabao or the Playas, where the beaches afford a perfect landing site for the Jaredite barges where the strong currents bring wave after wave into shore.

It should not be surprising that the Jaredite barges came ashore along this 90-mile stretch that is constantly pounded by wave after wave of the north-flowing currents—in fact, all the currents move in the same direction and would have taken a floating object, small or large, along the same path to end up in the same area.

Consider, that on January 10th 1992, the Evergreen Ever Laurel, a large container cargo ship, was caught in a storm of hurricane-force winds and 36-feet high waves in the North Pacific south of the Aleutians, near the International Date Line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers call the subarctic front. Here the container ship was rolling from side to side with great force, and on one steep roll, two columns of containers, stacked six high above deck, snapped loose from their steel lashings and retaining links, and under the strain of the pitching, rolling seas, the 40-foot-long containers crashed into the icy Pacific and drifted away in the turbulent waters. The spill happened about 500 miles south of Shemaya Island in the Western Aleutians and 2,000 miles northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. 

According to International Reports, as many as 10,000 containers are lost at sea each year. They float above or just below the surface. Sometimes the break open and disgorge contents

 

28,800 rubber ducks and other bath toys that were headed from China to the U.S. ended up in the water and the ocean currents took them, and ten months later in November, some of the toys began washing up on the beaches of Chickagof Island in southern Alaska’s Inside Passage region, where they were discovered by beachcombers. This area is near Sitka, Alaska, about 2,000 miles from their starting point.

The following spring the bath toys were discovered all over 500 miles of the south Alaskan coast from Kayak Island in the north to Coronation Island in the south. The wide spread was due to the breakdown of the packaging and the ducks entering the currents at different times and in different locations. In the fall they began washing ashore on Shimaya Island at the western end of the Aleutian Island chain Alaska (Eric Heupel, “How does a floating plastic duckie end up where it does?“ Scientific American, May 2, 2011).

Thousands of ducks have drifted ashore, mostly along the Alaskan seashore and even down to Washington state

 

Since 1992 ducks have washed ashore in waves on the beaches of southern Alaska, showing that, according to the beginning location, objects afloat will travel the ocean in more or less the same pattern and end up in the same location.

Now the name Ecuador in Quechua is Ikwayur; Shuar; or Ekuatur), officially the Republic of Ecuador (Spanish: República del Ecuador, which literally translates as "Republic of the Equator"; Quechua: Ikwadur Ripuwlika; Shuar: Ekuatur Nunka), and in the area to the east and north of the narrow neck of land, beyond the Land of Desolation, is a city today known as Riobamba—the city of Moron.

While the topography of the Santa Elena Peninsula were the Jaredites landed, itself is relatively flat, with low terraces bordering seasonal streams and small rolling hills, the land is up to two hundred feet elevation on the peninsula periphery—inland, were mangrove forests and dense gallery forests along interior streams and separated by grasslands. Further north in Ecuador were costal rain forests harbored a great diversity of fauna and flora, and the further north into Colombia were wet forests and semi-arid savannas.

One of the reasons why the Jaredites moved inland rather than stay along the coastal area where deserts abound, or in the time of the Jaredites, where an occasional forest was located—except for the Santa Elena Peninsula where they landed, which was quite barren and not conducive to settlement—is because of the heat.

On the other hand, further north along the coast was the location of the land and city of Nehor, a Jaredite city, in the land Northward. It was the location of where Shule battled Corihor (Ether 7:9).

It was also likely not far from the hill Ephraim where Shule “did molten out of the hill, and made swords out of steel for those whom he had drawn away with him; and after he had armed them with swords he returned to the city Nehor, and gave battle unto his brother Corihor, by which means he obtained the kingdom and restored it unto his father Kib” (Ether 7)

In addition, the coastal plains were typically hot from the tropical heat, with the temperature becoming cooler inland at higher elevations, such as where the city and capitol of Moron was established, up in the hill or mountain country at a higher elevation than the coastal plain, causing Kib to go up to Moron from Nehor, which would have been along the coast: “And when he had gathered together an army he came up unto the land of Moron where the king dwelt” (Ether 7:5, emphasis added), and the “land of Moron, where the king dwelt, was near the land which is called Desolation by the Nephites (Ether 7:6), making Moron not far from the northern border of the Land of Desolation.

Two distinctions of this area is that Santa Elena peninsula receives about four-inches of rain a year, and to the east at Guyaquil, the area receives about forty-inches of raino, and Riobamba about 58 inches per year. In addition, while the Santa Elena coast in the south faces to the southwest, the central coast faces west and the north coast faces northwest.

This Land Northward that Ether and then Moroni describes, certainly does not match any area in central and eastern North America, specifically the Heartland and the Great Lakes theories locations, and only slightly Mesoamerica.