In a roundup earlier this month of forthcoming books, I mentioned Tilar J Mazzeo’s To the Edge of the World, the story of how 19-year-old Mary Ann Patten, in 1856, took charge of her sick husband’s clipper, put down a mutiny and saved ship and crew from a gale around Cape Horn. In the summary of the book I’d seen, there was no mention of another important detail: she was pregnant at the time, as Donna Ferguson reveals in a piece for The Guardian for which she interviewed the author.