In hopes of delivering his people out of bondage, King Limhi had sent a party of forty-three people to Zarahemla to appeal for help. The group never made it to Zarahemla and, instead, got lost and found the land once occupied by the Jaredites. We do not know exactly where Limhi’s search party found the Jaredite remains, but we are getting a better idea as scholarly research continues. From the Book of Mormon record, we know the following: (1) there was a narrow neck of land in the general area; (2) the Land of First Inheritance, or the Land of Nephi, was somewhere southward and the party traveled northward, aiming to find Zarahemla; and (3) the party missed finding Zarahemla and for some reason ended up farther north, where they found the Jaredite records.
We also know approximately how far Zarahemla was from the Land of Nephi, where Limhi’s expedition started their journey. Alma and his group traveled from the Waters of Mormon, not too far from the city of Nephi, all the way up to the land of Zarahemla in 21 days. Alma’s group included men, women, children, and flocks and herds, so they couldn’t have traveled quickly or gone far in that amount of time. Alma and his people did not follow trails and presumably traveled over jungle terrain, so it would have been really pushing it if they were able to cover more than ten miles a day under those conditions. Scholars estimate that the distance between the Land of Nephi and Zarahemla was no more than 200 miles.
As Limhi’s party went north from the Land of Nephi, there must have been two ways to travel through the area, and they took the wrong one. Assuming that the lands of the Book of Mormon are located in Central America—;in the area of Guatemala, Chiapas, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and Mexico—there are, in fact, two ways Limhi’s party could have gone. One is to stay in the mountains—the highland route. That is the route that the Pan American Highway follows and is the traditional main trail through this area. However, if the trail was washed out or lost and the party moved off that trail and dropped down into a ravine (even slightly), they would have then been on the wrong side of a volcanic ridge, and there was no way to get back over to the river valleys to the east. Limhi’s expedition did not have compasses, so it would have been rather easy for them to lose their way in the wilderness as they tried to navigate or cross this area. If they managed to get down off the ridges, they would have had to travel on the coastal route, which is the only other way to go northward.
Travelling northward on the coastal route would in fact have dropped Limhi’s party into the area where the ancient Olmec population had settled. "Olmec" is the name given by modern archaeologists to describe the people living in this area anciently. It is not the name the ancient people would have used to identify themselves. The Olmec people lived in this land from about 2000 B.C. to around 500 B.C. The dates for the rise and fall of the Olmecs closely align with the dates that we have for the rise and fall of the Jaredites within the Book of Mormon. If the Olmecs were the Jaredite people who wrote their record on 24 plates found by Limhi’s expedition, this area of land would be where the explorers of Limhi discovered those plates and the remains of the Jaredite population.
In any event, we must be talking here about relatively short distances. Limhi’s exploring party would have had an approximate estimate of how far they needed to be traveling to get to Zarahemla, their desired destination. They would not have continued traveling for many months and going 3,000 miles thinking, "Zarahemla has to be over the next hill." And when they found the 24 plates, they were able to retrace their steps fairly easily to find their way back to the city of Nephi. So again, we’re talking a fairly small geographical region in which the land of Zarahemla and the land of Nephi were located. This event, of the return of this exploring party, is mentioned again in Mosiah 21:27, when the telling of the story of Limhi’s people is resumed.