Jaredite Barges

As I read the scriptures last night, I came to the account in the Book of Mormon of the Jaredites’ crossing of the great waters.  I read how they made eight small (Ether 2:16) barges that were the “length of a tree” and “tight like unto a dish.”  (v. 2:17).  Each barge was peaked at the ends, had a tight-fitting door, a hole in the top for air, and a hole in the bottom for ballast and sewage removal.  They prepared food for themselves and their flocks and herds.  (v. 6:4).  They put aboard water for themselves and their animals and fowls.  They put a shining stone in each end of the barge for light.  (v. 6:1).  Thirteen families got aboard eight vessels.  (v. 6:16).  On average, each barge carried two families.  These were likely young couples who had already been traveling together for perhaps eight years.  I’d guess that each family consisted of a set of parents and four children.  Each barge, therefore, carried perhaps 12 people.

After reading about these people as I prepared for sleep, I spent the rest of the night thinking and dreaming about them.  I saw their preparations, I saw them board the barges, and I imagined the 344-day trip.  (v. 6:11).

Talk about pioneers!  I just completed an assignment to research the handcart pioneers in the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies, and to assign the name of a pioneer to each of 216 stake youth who will go on a handcart trek next month.  What they endured is incomprehensible.  I suspicion that the Jaredites had a journey that rivals that of the handcart pioneers.  It’s significant that both groups sang to help them endure the journey.  (v. 6:9).  The handcart pioneers actually sang the “some must push and some must pull” song.  I previously thought that was composed after the fact for Primary children to sing, but it wasn’t.  They also sang “Come, come ye saints, no toil nor labor fear.”  The brother of Jared sang “praises unto the Lord, and did thank and praise the Lord all the day long.”  (v. 6:9).

In the night I wondered all sorts of things about the Jaredites and their trip.  How did the brother of Jared secure the shining stones in each end of the barges?  They couldn’t have been put in containers of any sort or they wouldn’t have been able to project their light.  They couldn’t be loose or they’d be pitched about with the tossing of the barge.  I decided that if the job were left to me, I’d suspend them from a string.

I could understand the hole that was cut in the top.  That’s explained in the Book of Mormon.  When the people suffered for air, they unstopped the hole and let fresh air in.  But what about the hole that the Lord told them to cut in the bottoms of the barges?  That’s not explained, and seems like a good way to sink the boat.  Actually it’s a very clever innovation.  Yes, water would come in through the hole; but since the barges were light, the water would only fill them to the point of equilibrium where the barges’ natural buoyancy would keep them afloat.  Obviously the Jaredites built a platform midway up on the insides of the barges where they and their animals stayed.  The water below the deck served as ballast to keep the barges upright, and was also an ingenious way to dispose of sewage as the ballast water continually refreshed itself through the hole.

The barges were small.  How did the Jaredites get “their flocks and herds, and whatsoever beast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them” aboard?  (v. 6:4)  Where did they put them?  How did they store enough hay and food and water for both the animals and themselves?  I discovered in the morning that each barge had a door, that when “shut, was tight like unto a dish.”  (v. 2:17).  Their cows didn’t have to be lowered through the upper hole like I was envisioning in the night.

I did some calculations in the morning.  One of our modern-day cows requires 22 pounds of feed per day.  If we allow just 20 pounds per day for a Jaredite cow, they had to stack 3-1/2 tons of loose hay in the barges for every cow and for every 5 sheep or goats that they took with them.  Their fowls required grain.  A year’s supply of wheat for an adult person is 300 pounds.  Multiply that by 12 people.  Add lots of jerky and dried fruit.  What about water?  Maybe I could get by with 6 cups per day.  Multiply that by 12 people.  Add 5 gallons of water per day for the cow.  Allow 5 more gallons per day for the 5 sheep and goats.  Each barge needed to carry upwards of 5000 gallons of water.  If I had been the Jaredites, I decided that I would have built a tank “tight like unto a dish” below the deck for fresh water storage.  That tank would have provided ballast and contributed to the stability of the barge.

I forget the conversion factor my father used to use that would tell how much space a ton of loose hay would occupy.  He used to have that figure memorized so that he could calculate how much hay was in a loose hay stack.  Suffice it to say that it required a bunch of space.  The animal pens required more space.  Food storage required some more.  The living space left over would have been small, indeed.  The dozen or so people aboard the barge huddled together there, and held on for dear life.

Getting the barges afloat was a chore.  They had to be built on the shore above high tide.  They wouldn’t have been easy to move, and would have been less so if loaded with animals, water, and provisions.  On the day of departure the people would have hurried and drug the empty barges down onto the beach when the tide went out.  They’d have formed a bucket brigade and would have filled the eight water tanks with fresh water that flowed in the creek beside the barges—over 40,000 gallons of water.  They’d have pitched in tons and tons of hay that they’d previously cut.  They led in the animals, and put them in their pens and cages.  They loaded their own provisions.  They hugged one another, wished each other good luck, got aboard their barges, shut the door, and wondered if they’d ever see their friends again.  They waited for the tide to come in, and felt a thrill of excitement as the barges began to lift and to move.

That’s when the excitement really began because “the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind…mountain waves…broke upon them, and …great and terrible tempests…were caused by the fierceness of the wind….And it came to pass that the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters….And thus they were driven forth, three hundred and forty and four days upon the water.”  (Ether 6: 5-11).

Horrors.

As a sailor in the U.S. Navy I was assigned to the USS Banner—a small, 180-foot vessel carrying 82 men.  I distinctly remember my first trip to sea.  Perhaps the sea wasn’t all that rough, but it was rough enough to greatly impress me.   It was night, and I was lying in my bunk down in the hold of the ship.  I could feel each wave as it passed.  The ship would climb the wave, teeter on the crest for a moment, and then the bow would slam down as the ship headed into the trough.  While teetering on the crest the ship would make horrible popping sounds, as if rivets were being snapped.  Lying there in my bunk it seemed that the ship would surely break in two.  I visualized the ship balanced on the fulcrum of the wave with both the bow and stern completely out of the water.  I’m sure things weren’t that extreme, but it certainly felt that way.  I had to talk to myself to keep myself from being frightened.  I could think of nothing worse than to suddenly find myself in a shipwreck in the middle of a stormy ocean.

What did the Jaredites feel like during their 344-day voyage?

Levi Savage was a member of the Willie Handcart Company.  He was called on a mission to Siam during the October 1852 general conference.  He went to Burma, learned Burmese, taught the people, baptized a few, and lived in unsanitary and primitive conditions for nearly three years.  He had an unpleasant, stormy voyage home through the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, arriving finally in Boston in February 1856 from whence he made his way to Iowa and joined the Willie Handcart Company for his second trip across the continent.  It’s his account of a storm at sea that impressed me, and which made me think of the Jaredites in their light barges as the “furious wind” blew unceasingly for 344 days.  He says:

“…the wind had increased into a perfect gale and the sea was foaming mad and running mountains high in the most irregular form imaginable.  When the sea broke upon the ship it would shake and tremble with great violence from stem to stern.  As she rode over them, she was lifted high into the air and would drop with great force as if she would go to the bottom.  She took great quantities of water in over her bow, over her stern and over both sides, which was dashed from one side to the other with great violence….There was scarcely a dry place there to be found.  As she rolled from her beam ends on one side to her beam ends on the other, trunks, boxes and lamp from the bunk, which had heretofore remained perfectly secure, were now hurled from their places and thrown across the cabin with great force.  The ship screeched and cracked as if she was breaking in pieces.  Some of her bulkhead was carried away and a small leak was started in her stern, but that was soon stopped.  All on board now carried long faces, I assure you.”  (They must not have known how to sing).  “I went into my room and offered up my prayer…but whether we would sink or swim was uncertain to me….Sleep was utterly out of the question for the cracking and crashing noises that the seas made as they broke upon and beat against our ship, her violent trembling and the heaving and springing of her decks as they struck her in the stern, gave us to fully understand that she could not endure such knocks long.  Her continual rolling…raised [her stern] so high in the air that she stood nearly erect [on] end [and] made [it] utterly impossible for a man to either lay, sit or stand without bracing against or holding on to something.”  (Tell My Story, Too, Jolene S. Allphin, pg. 123).

Just imagine how the Jaredites must have been tossed about in their light barges in the furious wind.  I used to think that the deck they lived upon would have been slatted so that manure from the animals could simply fall into the ballast and be washed away.  After riding with the Jaredites in my dreams last night, I’ve decided that the deck on which they lived had to have been mathematically placed high enough inside the barge to allow for all the water beneath it.  The deck itself would have had to be “tight like unto a dish” so that the sloshing ballast water wouldn’t keep them soaked.  I’ve decided that they had to daily clean the animals’ pens and throw waste through a trap door in the deck.

Food preparation and cleaning animal pens would have been about the only onboard chores they had.  The rest of the time was spent singing, holding on, and praying.  Did they have to strap themselves down when they wanted to sleep?

Eight barges were blown like logs across the Atlantic Ocean.  They had no radio communication with the other barges.  They had no way of knowing how the others were faring.  Did the Lord keep the barges all together?  Somehow the Jaredites managed to find one another once they hit the shores of the promised land.  Did they all make it?  Did one barge-load get blown off course and colonize some other unknown land?  What happened to the 16 shining stones?  Are they still shining somewhere waiting to be discovered?

These are all things I worried over in the night.  There are other stories yet to be written.