---
title: Improvement Era
description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930.
authors:
  - Hodapp, Minnie Iverson
collections:
  - periodicals
tags:
  - magazine
  - improvement-era
periodical: Improvement Era
volume: 22
number: 10
published: 1919-08
publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations
publisher_place: Salt Lake City
language: en
type: magazine
reference: 'Hodapp, Minnie Iverson, "The Home-Going, from Hawaii," *Improvement Era* 22, no. 10 (August 1919): 854.'
source:
  url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera22010unse
  transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers.
  identifier: improvementera22010unse
start_page: 854
end_page: 854
rights:
  status: public-domain
  basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1919-08)
  source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera22010unse
  publication_year: 1919
  note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1919, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright.
---

# 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.
