Roberts never found an answer to that question, and it troubled him the rest of his life. But here is the lesson to be learned from this story. Roberts’s dilemma was born of a particular view he held about the occupants of the New World. He believed that Lehi arrived on an empty continent, and that his descendants and his descendants alone eventually overran the hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to the Straits of Magellan. If that had been the case, then the language problem—along with a good many others—is indeed insoluble.
