A Dictionary of the Book of Mormon/Hagoth
HAGOTH. A Nephite ship-builder and promoter of emigration. He was a very ingenious mechanic, and in the thirty-seventh year of the Judges (B. C. 55), he settled on the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Panama, where the lands Desolation and Bountiful ran parallel. There he built an exceedingly large ship, and launched it on the Pacific Ocean. This ship he filled with men, women, and children, after which it set sail northward; and having delivered its living freight, it returned the next year, again to start northward loaded with passengers and provisions. He also built other ships, which engaged in the same trade. Some of these never reached their destination, they were either lost in the depths of the sea or were carried by storms and adverse winds to some of the many groups of islands that dot the Pacific Ocean. In this manner it is more than probable the Sandwich Islands were peopled with the ancestors of the present inhabitants. The loss of these vessels did not stop the outflow by sea northward. The voyage obviated the tedious land journey through the regions now known as Central America and Mexico. At what point these emigrants disembarked is solely a matter of conjecture, and it is highly probable that the configuration of the western coast, northward from the Isthmus, was very different, previous to the immense convulsions and upheavals that occurred at the death of Christ, to what it is today. From this time the Nephites paid considerable attention to ship-building, and the sea became the highway between the two continents.