The Voyage of the Mulekites

It is reasonable to believe that if the Phoenicians delivered the Mulekites to Peru, they would have taken the most favorable route from the Mediterranean to Peru. As noted above, there is evidence that the Phoenicians supplied addictive Peruvian drugs to their Egyptian patrons, thus suggesting that to feed their client's addictive habits the Phoenicians would have made somewhat regular voyages to Peru. If this is true, their captains over time would have charted the winds, currents, and landmarks to and from the Old World to Peru. We suggest that the Phoenicians delivered the Mulekites to the New World, used long-known but ever-developing charts, and started their passage by embarking from their harbor at Tyre and then sailed west through the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and around the southern tip of South America.

The Book of Mormon tells us that the Mulekites originally arrived in the land northward (Helaman 6:10), and the place of their first landing was in the land of desolation (Alma 22:30). It is more than coincidence that when the Spanish arrived in Peru the Incas still called the area around Lima the land of the people of desolation.25 For this reason, our simulation of the Mulek voyage ends at Lima, Peru. However, the land of desolation was not the Mulekites' final place of settlement in the promised land. George thinks the best candidate for the Mulekite settlement of Zarahemla was at Pukara, near Lake Titicaca in southern Peru. A verse in the Book of Mormon suggests that after some time the Mulekites boarded their ships again and sailed south. George thinks that was somewhere in what is today southern Peru. They eventually migrated back to the land northward and finally into the Andes Mountains near Lake Titicaca.