The Wager & Lemon and lime zest sourdough

A story of shipwreck, mutiny, and survival, and a scurvy-battling sourdough

Hello and welcome to this issue of Good Book/Good Bread! You won’t hear from me for a few months as I’m leaving tomorrow to try to canoe the Columbia River from source to sea, but I’ll be back with twice-monthly issues in October! And, as things are a little bit hectic getting organized for the trip, below is a short and sweet version of the usual newsletter. Enjoy!

Part 1: Good Book: The Wager by David Grann (2023)

In a nutshell

This fantastic work of non-fiction tells the story of a British ship named the Wager that was part of a squadron sent to intercept a Spanish ship carrying gold and silver off the southern coast of South America in the 1740s. After months of sickness and a very difficult voyage, the Wager wrecks near Cape Horn in 1741. The remote island they wreck on is nearly devoid of animal life or vegetation to sustain the men, and power struggles begin almost immediately. Unbelievably, multiple factions of the shipwrecked men actually were able to scrape together makeshift vessels and make it off the island, albeit spending many more months at sea before drifting onto the coasts of Brazil and Chile. Told beautifully through deep research as well as the incredibly detailed journals of the officers onboard, this is a suspenseful and mind-blowing true saga involving mutiny, murder, and white-knuckled survival. 

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The wildest things I read in the Wager 

This book was so good, and also made me so so glad I’ll never have to be a crew member on a 1700s war ship. Holy smokes, these guys had it rough. 

• Some of the men onboard for this multi-year voyage weren’t actually men—they were boys as young as 12, while the ship’s cook was 81. 

• They couldn’t find enough officers to staff the five ships making up the squadron, even after press gangs rounded up many men and forced them into the ships’ holds. To fill the ranks, 500 elderly veterans from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea were forced into the crew and loaded onto the ship. Many were missing limbs, partially blind or deaf, and some were so weak they had to be brought onto the ship in stretchers. 

• The captain of the Wager, after weeks being shipwrecked on the island, ended up wrapping his freezing cold feet in seal skin. A month later, he was so hungry he ended up eating his seal skin foot coverings. 

• When one of the ships was overcome with scurvy, at the time an unknown condition, old injuries like broken bones from decades prior would break out anew. 

Part 2: Good Bread: Lemon and lime zest sourdough 

Why this book for this bread? 

The chapter on scurvy among the squadron’s crew, which hit particularly badly on another ship sailing alongside the Wager, the Centurion, was horrific. Of the Centurion’s 500 men, nearly 300 died of scurvy. David Grann explains that the cure for their scurvy, citrus, had actually been right within their grasp when they stopped at a port on their journey where lemons and limes abounded. 

I decided a good bread to bake for this book would be a sourdough with lemon and lime zest. I wasn’t sure if it was going to turn out weird, but I was really happy with the taste. I put in about 2 tablespoons each of lemon and lime zest, and it had a wonderful and light flavour. I think it would go really well with jam or ricotta and honey. 

Thanks for reading!