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Where Did Nephi Build
the Ship?
Text and Photography by
Maurine and Scot Proctor
Editor’s note:
This article was published eight years ago on Meridian
Magazine. We publish it again today and also announce that October
12-24, 2008, we will be returning to the Arabian
Peninsula to follow Lehi’s Trail again.
And we invite you to join us (limited seats available, of course).
We will be going with Warren Aston of Australia on this most exciting adventure. This
tour is not for the faint of heart. Watch for more information
on Meridian and/or e-mail
us here: scot@meridianmagazine.com
We’ll send you initial details and pricing.
"We were exceedingly rejoiced
when we came to the seashore; and we called the place Bountiful because of its much fruit" (1 Nephi
17:6)
Lehi's journey as described in the Book of Mormon is
a strange and epic tale. He and his family wade through a barren
wilderness for eight years, facing every sort of deprivation, to
arrive at a jewel of a green refuge called Bountiful. Here is fruit in abundance, a tropical ocean, and a velvety
jungle on mountain slopes where hardwood trees tower, suitable for
building a ship.
Critics in Joseph Smith's day simply
hooted at the story. According to Hugh Nibley,
"The best guide to Arabia at the time
... imagined forests and lakes in the center of the peninsula, while
insisting that the whole coastline was 'a rocky wall...as dismal
and barren as can be: not a blade of grass or a green thing' to
be found." This certainly didn't fit the Book of Mormon
story.
Yet even later when Europeans came
to probe the Arabian Peninsula and understand
its geography, the story still seemed fantastic to the unbelieving
critic. Now they agree that Arabia is a desert, about as forsaken
and unrelenting as any place on earth, but how and where in all
this desolation could there be a seacoast forest that Nephi once
called Bountiful.
Click on
photos to enlarge
Unrelenting desert skirting the great “Empty
Quarter” of Arabia, the most forsaken wilderness on the planet.
The question has always been intriguing.
For his early 1950's series on the Book of Mormon in the
Improvement Era, Hugh Nibley pored
through the works of early explorers and found the writings of Bertram
Thomas, who shed some light on the puzzle. Captain Thomas in 1928
had traveled through the arid wastes of the southeastern corner
of Arabia and then been delighted and amazed
to descend from an arid steppe to finally pass through "wooded
valleys," "sylvan scenes," and lush forests to the
sea.
Yet it took two hardy Australian Saints,
Warren and Michaela Aston, to actually pack their bags, fly to Oman
and begin tramping up and down the coastline looking for Nephi's
Bountiful. As expected from the various reports over the years since
Thomas's, Arabia does have a tiny stretch of
verdant coastline, made green by the monsoons that pelt this corner
of the land and nowhere else. This forest is Arabia's
surprise, an anomaly in a land of sand and mountains like the moon.
But the Astons wanted more. They wanted
to test the land against Nephi's description to see if any specific
location matched. Nephi gave us many specific clues about his Bountiful. Clearly, it was coastal, accessible
from the interior along a reasonable route. What's more, it was
fertile, a place of "much fruit" and honey where the group
could grow crops to maintain themselves as they built a ship.
For a place to qualify as Bountiful,
it had to have timber in enough types and sizes to permit ship building
and a mountain prominent enough to be called "the mount,"
close enough that Nephi could retreat there and "pray oft."
Bountiful also had to have ore from which metal could be
smelted, a source to make fire, and probably a cliff by the sea
where Laman and Lemuel could have made
good their promise to throw Nephi into the deep.
With this comprehensive set of clues,
the Astons combed the coast and seriously considered six areas as
candidates for Bountiful.
Only one of the six was a fit-a tiny beach only a kilometer and
a half wide called Wadi Sayq,
nearly on the border between Oman
and Yemen. On either side of the
beach are 2,500-foot cliffs that drop straight into the sea, making
access impossible along the shore, but the wadi
(like a dry river bed) cuts its way 15 miles through a steep canyon
into the interior. This is the beach's only entrance, difficult
enough to travel that even though the beach basks glorious and green
in tropical sunlight Wadi Sayq is remote and forgotten.
To this day it is uninhabited, except by the occasional cow who
finds its way there to graze.
Wild camels rest at the
top of Wadi Sayq
about 15-20 miles from the ocean and at a 4,000-foot elevation.
Was this the place where Nephi built
the ship? The Astons were compelled enough by the match between
Wadi Sayq and Nephi's description
of Bountiful that they published a paper detailing their research
for FARMS, the Foundation for Ancient & Mormon Studies ("And
We Called the Place Bountiful: The End of Lehi's
Arabian Journey").
We first came upon the Aston's paper
while preparing to photograph and write our book Light from the
Dust: A Photographic Exploration into the Ancient World of the Book
of Mormon. This was the third in a trilogy of photographic books
we had created, and by far the most difficult. Our purpose in the
books had been to make vivid and tangible the sacred events of the
past by telling them scene by scene with photographs of the actual
places.
For the first book, Witness of the
Light, we had photographed those places significant in the restoration
and in the life of Joseph Smith. The places were documented with
land records, property deeds, structures, homes, streets, and fields
all directly tied to Joseph and his contemporaries.
Photographing the land that Jesus knew
for Source of the Light was more of a challenge, but with
Jewish and Christian names, and the almost timeless land of Israel, this task could be reasonably
accomplished. But how do you photograph the Book of Mormon lands?
Where do you go to shoot Zarahemla when
no road signs have yet been found saying "Zarahemla-City
Limits"? How do you follow the path of Lehi
from Jerusalem to Bountiful when the literal sands have blown over the trail for nearly
twenty-six centuries? Where did Nephi build that ship?
We were grateful for the Astons’ research
on that last question, and so, grabbing our camera, 350 rolls of
film, sleeping bags, bug spray, and the Aston's paper that included
a few hand-drawn maps, we prepared ourselves to take off for Oman
in May 1992.
On the trail of a mystery, there are
always obstacles, and we ran into our first one even before we left
Salt Lake City. Though
we tried diligently to obtain visas for Oman, we failed. Oman is an Arabian sultanate, immaculate, rich,
protected, hidden away like one of Ali
Baba's treasures. Until recently, they didn't allow tourists at
all. The year before we applied for our visas, they had only admitted
8,000 tourists, 6,000 of them Arab.
Asking travel agents about Oman,
we got only blank stares. Nobody had been there. Nobody knew anybody
who had. The best advice we got was to fly to Cairo
and to try to get our visas there.
At the American Embassy in Cairo,
the official said we'd never get a visa for Oman.
Yet, driving to the Omani embassy through the jungle and heat of
Cairo traffic with horns honking and twelve cars
vying for six lanes of traffic, we felt what we normally wouldn't
have felt in the din: the Spirit whispered peace to us, a quiet
assurance that pierced through the noise.
At the Omani embassy we asked for visas,
and the man behind the desk looked at us indifferently, saying an
English sentence he had used many times before: "It is impossible."
Still the Spirit had whispered to us, and to this we clung, sitting
down on the office couch as if we simply didn't understand the word
impossible. Finally, not certain how to get rid of us, he
gave us visa applications, and a week later we were on our way.
We are always extremely specific in
our prayers, asking the Lord to touch every detail of our journey.
Now, flying to a country nobody could tell us about, we prayed fervently
that He would provide a good map for us, as good maps are extremely
difficult to obtain in Arab countries.
Renting our jeep in Salalah, we looked over the tourist maps available. They didn't
offer the detail we needed to find a remote wadi
well off the paved road. We asked the man at the car rental agency
if he didn't have anything better. He looked to the right and to
the left and then said to us in hushed tones, "I can give you
this map, but it is a top secret military map. Be careful."
We studied the map with gratitude. It was in English, was an extremely
detailed topographical map, and covered only the area we wanted
to travel, kilometer by kilometer.
Formidable
view from the top of Wadi Sayq. You would have to have
a Liahona to encourage you to go down
such a canyon with your families.
Eighty miles south of Salalah, in a land nearly unrelieved by vegetation or people,
the paved road began to wind tortuously around the dry, steep gorge
that is Wadi Sayq.
The wadi drops off the western plateau at about 4,000 feet and
winds sixteen miles down a narrow path through limestone canyons
to shore. From our vantage, at the beginning of the wadi's
descent, it was not evident that in a few miles the canyon would
be lined with jungle, that the unrelenting brown would give way almost instantly,
at the turn of a corner, to emerald forests.
Emerald forests and greenery
would greet Nephi and Lehi and family
just about two miles from the ocean.
If this was the way Nephi and his family
came, it would have been like this. They would have had no indication,
as they began to wind through a canyon, that
the sea was so close, that within miles the thirsty, folded land
would be blanketed in green only two miles from shore.
We saw a type here. We are told to
"endure to the end," to bear with patience our tribulations,
yet the end does not always announce itself. Sometimes when we feel
we can be brave no longer, all that is required of us is just a
little more.
Our first
view of Wadi Sayq
from high above on the cliffs overlooking the Arabian
Sea.
Unable to travel the wadi to the shore, we found an unmarked dirt road that we
hoped would lead to Rakhqut, a tiny, seaside
village about six miles along the shore from Wadi
Sayq. Our calculations were correct, and we arrived after
dark to a village shut down for the dry season, its inhabitants
retreated to the mountains. It stood quiet and ghostly on the shore
of the sea, a silent mirage.
We stopped the one truck we saw and
with gestures and a few words asked, "How do we get to Wadi Sayq?" They answered that
the only way to go there was "by ship," and we understood
that in the morning someone would help us.
In the evening darkness, we drove out
of the nearby deserted village and parked by the beach, trying to
find a place to rest. The stars shone brightly over the Arabian
Sea, the northeastern curve of the Indian Ocean.
We walked to shore, trying to decide which stretch of sand to sleep
on, when suddenly a set of headlights and a horn pierced the night.
We went toward the lights with some
anxiety. Had we broken a law? Was this the military or the police?
In true Arabian hospitality, it was a few remaining villagers come
to greet us with cold drinks and an offer to take us to Wadi
Sayq the next morning in a fishing boat.
Here was our “ship” that would take us the few kilometers on the
Arabian Sea to get to Wadi
Sayq. Note the six-plus-foot waves.
Our navigator was to be a scrawny fourteen-year-old
boy who spoke only Arabic. We showed him our photocopied pictures
of Wadi Sayq
from the Astons' paper, drew maps in the sand, pointed in the air,
and finally, somehow, came to an agreement. He hadn't been to the
wadi, but he recognized it.
Placing $6,000 of camera equipment
in the front of an 18-foot fishing boat was a little disquieting
the next morning. The six- and seven-foot waves crashing onto the
beach looked as if they would easily swallow a Pentax,
a Nikon, and us — and no life jackets were available. But this boy
knew the ocean and he watched the waves and at a signal pushed us
quickly into the sea. Not one drop touched us or the equipment.
Within minutes, at full throttle, we arrived at one of the most
beautiful locations in the million square miles of Arabia. The boy haltingly uttered his first English sentence, "This
is Wadi Sayq."
Early morning sun glimmers upon the beautiful beach
where we landed at the most likely candidate where Nephi built the
ship.
We landed at the far west end of the
beach and, wading through the night's tidewater pool, we brought
all our gear to a higher area by a large rock and began drawing
symbols and pictures in the sand to encourage the boy to come back
the next day to pick us up. Three o'clock was the appointed hour;
we would have 32 hours to photograph this place.
Wadi Sayq
is one of two "rivers" in Arabia
that flow near the shore with water all year round. Trees abound
with "much fruit" available in the form of date-palms-fruit
to the Bedouin way of thinking. Dolphins playfully frolic in the
waters near the beach wild flamingos wade in the fresh water, searching
for food. We began quickly scouting for pictures in the early morning
light.
This lovely wadi has water all year round and is a lovely contrast to
the stark desert but two or three miles from here.
It was, as the Astons suggested, a
place that perfectly matched Nephi's description. A free-standing
mountain occupied the southwest of the beach. Towering tamarind
and sycamore trees suitable for shipbuilding grew up in the wadi
a few hundred yards away from shore. Here was a freshwater source,
sardine in the sea for eating, land and water to grow crops. We
had seen jasper deposits at the top of the wadi,
suitable for striking together to make fire. These were a startling
combination of characteristics in Arabia.
Monsoons water the area from June through
September, creating a knot of jungle and undergrowth in the wadi and seaward slopes, but since we were there in the driest
month of the year, May, we soon learned we had come with disadvantages
and an advantage. The land was not as beautiful for photography,
but the vegetation had burned back, exposing the wadi's
secrets.
Here you can see the peculiar mound and part of the
double-row of stones leading away from it.
The Astons had written that they had
found archaeological remains in Wadi Sayq, signs of former human habitation. They reported that
on the east side of the wadi stood a mound
some twelve feet high and forty-five feet in diameter, now covered
with wind-blown sand and vegetation. Radiating from this mound,
they noted, were double lines of stones. One of them stretched about
ninety feet toward the beach. A second double line of stones, some
400 feet long, curved back toward the freshwater of the wadi.
They also reported a rock face, not
far from the mound that contained several groups of graffiti. Though
some of the graffiti looked relatively recent, sketched on the rock
was what appeared to be a much older set of graffiti, its red pigment
faded with time. Painted in that faded red on the rock
was a ship.
If you look
carefully you will see an ancient image of a ship drawn in graffiti
on the rock face not far from the mysterious mound. A large black
camel is drawn, perhaps hundreds of years later, over the ship just
about center of the picture.
We began our exploration of the wadi
on the opposite side from the mounds, asking the Lord to open our
eyes to see what was there. As we walked, we started to see double
lines of stones everywhere. One line over 600 feet long stretched
perpendicular from the beach, back into the trees. Another at right
angles to it ran across the valley. The more we walked, the more
we saw. One sixty-foot line of double stones ended at a twenty-four-foot
square collapsed area.
Here you can look across the expanse of the wadi
(where the green is) and note many lines of stones — signs of human
habitation.
On we walked, exploring the wadi,
double-checking the Astons’ paper to see if they had mentioned any
of this. They hadn't. We wondered if their silence indicated that
they had come in the wet season and that vegetation had obscured
the view.
The further we explored, the more stunned
we were. Who had built these double lines, and for what purpose?
Further down the wadi, we saw a foundation.
Not far away we began to see several three-feet high stone structures
shaped like an omega. A little father, we saw the remains of an
ancient well. At every turn, we documented what we saw, taking hundreds
of photographs in just a few hours.
We started to do more concrete thinking
about Nephi and his family than we ever had before, lifting them
out of the vague nowhere land of our imagination to begin to wonder
how practically they had accomplished their mission at a place called
Bountiful. Just before they had come to Bountiful,
they had traveled through the wilderness of their much affliction,
probably skirting the world's most terrible wilderness — the Empty
Quarter. This is a place so miserable that its first recorded crossing
was in 1928. Surely, upon their arrival at Bountiful,
then, they had been out of food and needed to grow crops to store
to take with them on their long ocean voyage. They had probably
been there for more than one season.
Free-standing mount here at Wadi
Sayq could have been the mount where Nephi
went oft to talk to God (see 1 Nephi 18: 3)
Throughout the day, we explored both
sides of the wadi, sloshing back and froth
across it, photographing the mound, the graffiti, and more, but
if an Arabian Sea beach home was a refuge to Nephi, it wasn't to us. The 110-degree
heat was enervating, and we guzzled our bottled water shamelessly,
not wanting to trust the fresh water at the site. By night we marveled
that anyone could have built a ship in a place so beautiful but
uncomfortable.
Sleeping was nearly impossible with
the heat, the hungry mosquitoes, and noisy sand crabs. After a short
while, our skin began to twitch from the insect poison it carried.
We finally fell into a fitful sleep, amazed at what we'd seen and
hoping the boy would remember to come get us the next day.
By morning, we were quickly running
out of water, so having photographed extensively and hiked as far
as strength would allow, we decided to rest in the shade of the
rock face with the ancient graffiti, read 1 Nephi and pray. Somewhere
in the middle of chapter seven or eight, we began to feel little
pains on our legs and pulled up our pant legs to see we were covered
with ticks — ticks already red with our blood. (Scot ended up with
137 bites that took more than four months to heal.)
The wadi
is verdant and inviting and probably seemed like heaven to Nephi
and Lehi and family; hence they named
the place “Bountiful.”
From our vantage in the shade at a
high point on the beach,
we strained our eyes toward the southwest side, watching for the
boy to return. Suddenly we saw something. There before us, in a
path we had blindly walked over perhaps five or six times, was an
oval rock pattern outline on the beach in the exact shape of a ship.
We walked around it, observing it closely. It measured 130 feet
long by 65 feet wide. At each end and in the middle of the pattern
was a large buildup of rocks.
Could these have been the supports
for the scaffolding of a ship? Curiously, here, in this oval shape,
the vegetation grew more densely. We knew that archaeologists have
often observed that where wood has deteriorated, vegetation grows.
And if people built a ship and launched it, they would certainly
not stop to tear down their scaffolding but leave it, as is, to
decay into the earth.
Note the darkened area in an oval shape in the midst
of the barren rocks and then the dark piles of rocks leading down
to the ocean. When the true history
books are opened, the expedition of Lehi's
family, over twenty centuries before Columbus,
will be counted as one of the greatest journeys of all time.
Finally, we noted piles
of rocks leading in succession to the high-water tide line of the
ocean, perhaps used as supports for a launching ramp.
Large
stone that could have been used as part of a foundry.
Not far from here, we noted a large,
concave, half-moon-shaped rock with an air shaft that ran completely
underneath. Observing the traces of carbon built up on the rock
face, we mused that this might be a candidate for a foundry. The
rock, the mound, and the oval shape of a ship were all proximate
to each other. We wondered if the double line of rocks from the
fresh water to the mound was to bring water to run some kind of
waterworks, if the mound might have once been some kind of pulley
system used to build a ship.
We also wondered if the double line
of rocks from the fresh water to the mound was used in any way to
transport the lumber from the large trees that grew a little further
up the wadi.
Trees that towered 70 and 80 feet high grew in abundance
along the edge of wadi.
For us however, the time at Wadi
Sayq had ended. In this forgotten place,
we had discovered what had not been seen before. As we hopped into
the little boat, this time with four other Arab boys, and headed
eastward on the ocean to the village, we would have been content
to ponder what we had seen.
Instead, we had not been traveling
five minutes when the boys cut the motor way back. We turned around
to see their faces white with fear. We had noticed a large, dark
swell of water to the front of the boat. "What's wrong?"
we asked.
"Nimrani!" they cried back.
"What's a nimrani," we asked.
"Very
big fish. Eats people."
"How big?"
"Bigger than the boat," was
their reply.
We later learned that our little boat
had been floating on top of a whale shark, which can be as large
as 65 feet long and weigh 70,000 to 80,000 pounds, but they are
not hostile, which knowledge would have been comforting at the time.
Moments later, large five- and
ten-pound fish were jumping headlong out of the water and over the
full length of our boat. Fish after fish, seemingly defying gravity,
sprang over our boat. The boys handed us our empty two-liter water
bottles and motioned for us to protect ourselves by "batting"
them away from us.
So what do we conclude from our trip
to Wadi Sayq?
We do not know who made that mound, those double lines of stones.
We do not know who left the shape of a large ship on the beach there
with piles of rocks that lead to the ocean. We do not yet know conclusively
in what time period these things were built. Nor, at this point,
without further study, can we be sure exactly what the original
purpose was for the scanty remains left behind. Since our trip,
FARMS sent a team of scholars to observe the area. A few others
have returned as well. Much is left to be discovered here.
View of the best candidate for Nephi’s Bountiful
in this remote corner of Oman.
Everything about this place fits the description that is given in
the account in 1 Nephi.
What is clear is that Lehi's desert journey, ending in a lush refuge called Bountiful where his family built a ship, is perfectly
plausible. A place that perfectly meets that description exists.
There on the beach remains the shape of a ship. It is not unlikely
that Wadi Sayq
is the very place where Lehi came. Whether
it is or not, someone found the eastern coast of Arabia
a fine place for shipbuilding, complete with ample trees.
How could Joseph Smith have known any
of this when he translated the Book of Mormon in 1829? He couldn't
have. That Wadi Sayq
exists is, as Hugh Nibley would say, another
"bulls-eye" for the Book of Mormon.
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