Necks of Land

Now that we know the Lord's language target for the Book of Mormon (see the blog article "Early Modern English") was the Tudor period into the Stuart period (1500's and 1600's), we are prepared to investigate one of the most contentious phrases in the text, the "small neck of land"Alma 22:32 aka "narrow neck"Alma 63:5 aka "narrow neck of land"Ether 10:20. What would English speakers in the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline eras have considered a "neck" of land? How large would a neck of land have been? Would a neck have been surrounded by fresh water, estuarial water, salt water, some combination of waters or no water at all?

Fortunately, we have a great deal of data to work with that will help us answer these questions. During the Tudor and Stuart periods, waves of English colonists founded settlements from Nova Scotia to Georgia and beyond. They originated thousands of place names including hundreds of "necks" of land whose names still appear on modern maps. We will use Google Earth to analyze a statistically significant (though far from exhaustive) sample of 115 necks of land named by English settlers. Our conclusions will help us determine what kind of geographic feature we should be looking for when we try to locate Mormon's and Moroni's "narrow neck" on the modern map.

This article expands and extends the previous series of blog articles "Isthmuses,""Narrow and Small Things,""Another Geographic Neck,""The Narrow (Small) Neck of Land," and "The Narrow Pass and Narrow Passage."

David R. Ransome published an article entitled "Village Tensions in Early Virginia: Sex, Land, and Status at the Neck of Land in the 1620s" in The Historical Journal Vol. 43, No. 2 (June, 2000), Cambridge University Press. That particular neck of land is a meander in the James River downstream from modern Richmond in contemporary Chesterfield County. The famous Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia (Peter Jefferson was Thomas' father) first published in 1751 calls it simply "Neck of Land."

Neck of Land south of the James River settled by the 1620's

The same 1751 map shows at least 2 other necks of land in Virginia. One is Henrico Neck in modern Henrico County.

Henrico Neck north of the James River

The other is Savith (modern Savage) Neck in modern Northampton County on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

Savith Neck jutting into Chesapeake Bay

These are the 115 necks of land in our study:

Eaglehawk Neck, Tasmania

The other is Narrowneck Beach on Australia's famed Gold Coast near Brisbane. Narrowneck Beach is a .09 km wide tongue of land between the Pacific Ocean to the east and a small branch of the Nerang River to the west. Narrowneck Beach is the narrowest neck in our sample.

Narrowneck, Queensland

Both examples of isthmian necks are from Australia whose English settlement began in 1788 when the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay (modern Sydney) and founded a penal colony.

One of our sample necks is not surrounded by water. Narrow neck near Katoomba, Australia is a cliff-lined sandstone peninsula less than 1 km wide separating Jamison Valley on the east from Magalong Valley on the west.

Narrow Neck, New South Wales shown with 3X vertical exaggeration

The other 114 necks of land in our sample are surrounded by some combination of fresh, estuarial and salt water. We have classified 16 different combinations:

Bradford Neck, Accomack County, Virginia

Brickhouse Neck, Northampton County, Virginia

Great Neck, Accomack County, Virginia

Harris Neck, McIntosh County, Georgia

Holt Neck, Northampton County, Virginia

Saquish Neck, Plymouth County, Massachusetts

Upshur Neck, Accomack County, Virginia