How would they know that this particular landfall was “the promised land”? Traveling along the route that Clark and Sorenson propose, it seems likely that they would have made landfall somewhere on the Pacific Coast of the Americas. Sorenson indicates that the most plausible landing location would have been along the coast of modern Guatemala. Did the Lord indicate that this particular coast was the correct land? Was Nephi reading back into his history his later knowledge?
Geography: Of course, the party landed on a beach. There are no textual clues about the landing place. The only way the plausible landfall can be deduced is by working backwards from other textual features that match New World geography. In this case, the descriptions of the Book of Mormon fit well with a Mesoamerican location. If that correlation is correct, we can reconstruct the most likely first landfall. Given the likely voyage over the Pacific, we have a west coast landing. There is no indication that Nephi and his followers traveled hundreds of miles when they fled from Laman and Lemuel’s murderous intentions. This suggests that the landfall was the closest Pacific coast to the better-described lands that we find later in the Book of Mormon. Guatemala’s coast becomes the most likely candidate.
Modern Guatemala is roughly the size of Ohio. The southern coastal plain rises to a piedmont, then a full mountain range. Across that range is the area known as the highlands. More than 30 volcanoes form a chain across the southern part of the country. This chain roughly parallels the coastline about 25 to 30 miles from the coast. Some of these are still active, and earthquakes are virtually an annual occurrence in their vicinity.
The coastline of Guatemala does not offer any safe harbors. Even in the modern seaports on the Pacific, Ocos, Champerico, and San José, the ships anchor well off shore. Since Lehi’s family had no expectations of continuing to use their ship for further travel, this would not have presented a particular difficulty. However, the coastal plain also includes a number of swamps, and this suggests that they might have sailed parallel to the coast for some small distance to find an appropriate area on which to come ashore.
Once ashore they would have moved away from the coastline to the piedmont area where the rainfall was more appropriate for crops. The temperatures in this area range from 85 to 90 degrees F. in the daytime, and from 70 to 75 degrees F. at night.