I want to retire from the Post Office and live in South America and do Book of Mormon Archaeology for a while. My sister in-law has taken possession of a very nice home in Bogota, Colombia. With sufficient financial backing we could set up headquarters for The Foundation for South American discoveries of The Book of Mormon. Already discovered from textual evidence a dozen hard sites of Book of Mormon relevance need to be explored. We need boots on the ground to prove it.
Believed by Orson Pratt and others when they thought the narrow neck was Panama.
In the hand of Frederick G. Williams.“The course that Lehi traveled from the city of Jerusalem to the place where he and his family took ship, they traveled nearly a south, southeast direction until they came to the nineteenth degree of North Latitude, then, nearly east to the Sea of Arabia then sailed in a southeast direction and landed on the continent of South America in Chili [Chile] thirty degrees south latitude.”
Actually, Nephi stated that they journeyed East for the most part and wading through much tribulation for eight years. Who thinks that they took eight years to get to the other side of the Arabian Peninsula? The nineteenth parallel is also in Viet Nam a more likely land of Bountiful far enough from Jerusalem to account for an eight year journey, needing, Laiahona, to avoid strangers as they passed through their lands not cooking with fire to remain undetected.
The reality of the Book of Mormon text precludes leaving South America proper. The anthropological evidence concerning the Amazon Basin says it was only sparsely populated until 2000 years ago when its population greatly increased. This bodes well for the inundation of the Amazon Basin during most of the Book of Mormon times and accounts for the Sea East and the Narrow neck of land between the flooded Amazon Basin and the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador. Which wonderfully supports Cajamarca, Peru for Zarahemla and the Marana River for Sidon and the head waters in Manti still North of the land of their first inheritance down in Chili, which would be the Land of Nephi and where the first temple was built like unto Solomon's, almost.