Mormon, in his abridgment of the Nephite record, again adds an interesting insight into the historical extent of the lands the Book of Mormon people occupied. He records that the people “did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east” (Hel 3:8). This reference to four seas, each named for one of the four cardinal directions, defined the outer limits of the occupied Book of Mormon lands, which Mormon suggests were the “face of the whole earth.” We believe this mention of the “whole earth” was in reference to only the known extent of the lands the Book of Mormon people actually settled, not the entire globe as we know it today or even the larger continent they resided within. The Greeks used the word oikoumene to convey this same notion of “the inhabited world,” the much smaller land area they settled, explored and understood, and not the entire continent of Europe or the larger world beyond.

We have demonstrated by the many references to a sea on the east and a sea on the west, bordering all of the major Book of Mormon lands, that the elongated positions of the “sea west” and “sea east” can be readily correlated to a peninsula. This would suggest the Book of Mormon people were confined to a peninsula that forced the people to migrate northward, thus the sea south was probably the ocean waters south of the southern cape of this peninsula.

A “sea north”—mentioned only once in the Book of Mormon—is more difficult to correlate and locate because the peninsula was connected on the north to a larger land mass. For example, the Nephities, when they were located in the land of Zarahemla, preserved a northern “country they might flee” to (Alma 22:34). Mormon also stated that the people did “go forth from the land southward to the land northward,” indicating that the major migration direction was from south to north and not from north to south (Hel 3:8).

Because the Book of Mormon lands were not an island, but were connected to a larger land mass to the north, the “north sea” was probably a large inland salt water sea in the “land of many waters” on the northern borders of their occupied lands. This inland sea was not unlike the ancient Lake Bonneville in the Great Basin of Utah and the surrounding area that existed in Book of Mormon times and later diminished in size to become the Great Salt Lake. We believe this “north sea” was indeed a sea of salt water since the term “many waters” (a large body of sea water) combined with “rivers and fountains” (Morm. 6:4) would indicate contrasting types of fresh and salt bodies of water. It would seem redundant to mention “many waters” and “fountains” if they were all inland fresh bodies of waters. (See the section above, The Sea, Irreantum and “Many Waters” and also The Land of Nephi: the Waters of Mormon in our main article, An Approach to the Book of Mormon Geography)