I had a blast (literally!) writing Castaway with the Cowboy. When an explosion sinks their steamship, horse wrangler Zach Holifield and nanny Abby Lindstrom find themselves stranded on a deserted island in the Caribbean. Along with Abby’s two young charges, a cabin boy, and a couple of missionaries, Zach and Abby struggle for survival, normalcy, and a chance to live, to love, and to grow old together.
So, I’m happily writing along all the way to the end, (and it’s a humdinger!) when my copy editor stumped me. She highlighted a line that got me to thinking…
Abby talked about washing their clothes when they find water and the copy editor wanted to know where’d they’d get soap, since they’d barely escaped the sinking ship with their lives. What a wonderful question! And one that sent me on a quest to find out how many ways Abby could make soap on a deserted island.
I was surprised to find that making soap doesn’t require some magic ingredient or special containers. Making soap isn’t as difficult as you would think. All you need is animal fat/grease—or vegetable/plant oil, water and ashes. And women in the past would have learned at an early age how to save their ashes and leach them to get lye.
The primary ingredient is the potash or pearl ash from ashes. Pure potash can be achieved by leaching wood ashes. To do this under primitive conditions, take a small container with a small hole or holes punched through the bottom.
Place a one-inch layer of gravel or sand in the bottom of the container, and a one-inch layer of sand (aha, perfect for our characters stranded in the Caribbean!) on top of the gravel. The gravel and sand act as filters.
Fill the container with ashes from a cooled campfire. Place another container under the first container to catch the runoff and slowly pour about a gallon of water over the ashes allowing a brownish-gray water (the lye) to exit through the bottom into the second container.
Pour slowly. If the ashes start to “swim”, you are pouring the water too fast. During this process, if the lye coming out starts to lose its color, more ash can be added.
Next, boil the lye water until more than half of the water has evaporated. The mixture may foam, and the resulting solution is potash.
Next, add 1 ½ cup of lard, grease or animal fat to the boiling mixture and continue cooking for about 30 minutes. If using animal fat, make sure it is free from meat or food particles as the soap may spoil during the drying process if the fat used isn’t pure.
When the desired consistency is reached, place the mixture into molds. The shape doesn’t matter. Since my characters are on an island, they could have used a wooden mold carved from a tree limb, a small coconut shell, seashells, anything will do. Let the mixture dry for about two days, then remove from the mold.
Once my characters managed to leach enough lye from their ashes, all they’d need to do would be to find enough animal fat or some type of oil to make their soap for washing and bathing. Goats, pigs, and sheep are sometimes found on islands, so that would be one source for animal fat. Actually, goats play a big part in Zach and Abby’s story, so that was covered.
And, coconut oil (with flakes of coconut) makes excellent soap, as does the oil from eucalyptus leaves, or any vegetable oil will do. And you can also make soap from goat’s milk. I’d venture to say that soap made from goat’s milk is softer than, say, something made with lard, even on a deserted island. So I can see the women preferring to bathe with this softer, gentler soap.
When researching this post, I read that if your soap is too soft, toss in a bit of salt the next time, so that made me wonder if seawater would be a good thing or bad. So, off to google again…
Yep. You can. Just google “sea salt soap recipe”. Amazing.
Abby—and the missionary’s wife stranded along with her—probably wouldn’t have cared about adding a lot of delicate scents to their soap or how harsh or brittle it was, but I imagine with the bounty of flora and fauna found on an island, they’d want to experiment, wouldn’t they?
Can you think of a scent they could add to their soap to give it a pleasing aroma? Something that would be found on an island in the Caribbean. Do you enjoy homemade soaps? If so, what’s your favorite scent?
Castaway with the Cowboy
When an explosion sinks their steamship, horse wrangler Zach Holifield and nanny Abby Lindstrom find themselves stranded on a deserted island in the Caribbean. Along with Abby’s two young charges, a cabin boy, and a couple of missionaries, Zach and Abby struggle for survival, normalcy, and a chance to live, to love, and to grow old together.
Available for a limited time for .99cents!
