The People of New Zealand

Two Questions

1. How old was Chief Captain Moroni when he died?

Answer:  (From Doctrinal Commentary on the Book of Mormon Volume 3, by Robert Millet and Joseph Fielding McConkie, page 328).  “Moroni died at a rather young age, approximately forty-four years old.”  (See Alma 43:17 and compare with Alma 63:3)  (Bro. Ray’s comment: Perhaps battle weary?)

2. Who was the father of the Polynesians?

Answer: (From same reference as above, this time from pages 328 to 329).  “In the Church it is generally held that Hagoth (Alma 63:5) was the father of the Polynesians, that his expeditions to the isles of the sea were a part of the foreordained plan whereby the descendants of father Lehi, as children of Abraham, might be spread to all nations and thus fulfill God’s covenant with the father of the faithful.  (Abraham 2:8-11)

In speaking to the Saints in Samoa, President Spencer W. Kimball said: “I thought to read to you a sacred scripture, which pertains especially to you, the islanders of the Pacific.  It is in the 63^rd Chapter of Alma. (He then read Alma 63:4, 7-10)  And so it seems to me rather clear that your ancestors moved northward and crossed a part of the South Pacific.  You did not bring your records with you, but you brought much food and provisions.  And so we have a great congregation of people in the South Seas who came from the land southward and went to the land northward, which could have been Hawaii.

Then the further settlement could have been a move southward again to all of these islands and even to New Zealand.  The Lord knows what he is doing when he sends his people from one place to another.  That was the scattering of Israel.  Some of them remained in America and went from Alaska to the southern point.  Others of you came this direction.” (Samoa Area Conference Report, February 1976, page 15) 

To another group of Saints in the South Seas, President Kimball observed:  “President Joseph F. Smith, the 6^th president of the Church reported, ‘You brothers and sisters from New Zealand, I want you to know that you are from the people of Hagoth.’ For New Zealand Saints, that was that.  A prophet of the Lord had spoken…It is reasonable to conclude that Hagoth and his associates were about nineteen centuries on the islands from about 55 B.C. to 1854 before the gospel began to reach them.  They had lost all the plain and precious things which the Savior brought to the earth, for they were likely on the islands when Christ was born in Jerusalem.”  (Temple View Area Conference Report, Feb. 1976, page 3)

In Alma 63:8 it tells us: “we suppose that they were drowned in the depths of the sea.”  “This is one of the subtle testimonies of the truthfulness of this record.  Had Joseph Smith simply been creating the Book of Mormon, fabricating it, rather than translating it, he probably would not have inserted such ideas into the narrative.  Here we see that Mormon, a powerful prophet-editor, was simply unaware of what became of Hagoth and his followers.  Living almost five centuries after their departure from the promised land, Mormon could have inquired as to their whereabouts, but presumably he had not done so, or if he had, he had not learned by revelation what become of those people.”