The Home-Going, from Hawaii

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856 IMPROVEMENT ERA

was given them which continually pointed in the direction they should sail (lb. 16) (5) that the land they sailed for was ;

called the "promised land" (lb. 18) (6) and that the people ;

were named after their first leader, "Nephites." Here are six historical items relating to the Nephite colonization of South America, as detailed in the first book of the Book of Mormon. Are they facts? Did these events really occur? What answers do the archaeologists give to these important questions? 1. That the knowledge of the coming of the four brothers, Laman, Lemuel, Sam and Nephi, to South America, and that Nephi, the youngest, became the ruler, was not forgotten by South American tribes, is evident from statements in Baldwin's Ancient America. On page 264 of his work, Baldwin makes the following quotation from Montesinos

"It [the civilization of South America] was originated, he says, by a people led by four brothers, who settled in the Valley of Cuzco, and developed civilization there in very human way. The youngest of these brothers assumed supreme authority, and became the first of a long line of sovereigns."

Daniel Brinton, a more recent writer on American archaeology, in his Myths of the New World, page 94, gives a similar account of the settlement of South America:

"Hardly a nation on the continent but seems to have had some vague tradition of an origin from four brothers, to have at some time been led by four leaders or princes, or in some manner to have connected the appearances and action of four important personages with its earliest traditional history."

2. Professor Joyce also relates a distorted story of the coming of four brothers whose names he gives as Ayar, Manco, Cachi, Auca; and what is more remarkable is the story he gives of a dispute which took place between Manco, the oldest of these brothers, and the youngest. To quote South American Archaeology, page 79, by T. Athol Joyce:

"Apparently Manco became jealous of his brothers, and took means to remove them, but the account of their fate has become invested with the glamor of the supernatural. Ayar was persuaded to return for certain golden vases, and the figure of a llama, the latter being a kind of a sacred standard, which he was told had been left in a cave."

It is not difficult to find in this quotation some confirmation of Nephi's story of the return for the brass plates. It will be obeerved that it was the younger of the brothers who was "persuaded to return for the golden vases," and that it was the older brother who manifested the jealousy towards the younger.