  We investigate the existence of solitary gravity waves traversing a
two-dimensional body of water that is bounded below by a flat impenetrable
ocean bed and above by a free surface of constant pressure. Our main interest
is constructing waves of this form that exhibit a discontinuous distribution of
vorticity. More precisely, this means that the velocity limits both upstream
and downstream to a laminar flow that is merely Lipschitz continuous. We prove
that, for any choice of background velocity with this regularity, there exists
a global curve of solutions bifurcating from a critical laminar flow and
including waves arbitrarily close to having stagnation points. Each of these
waves has an axis of even symmetry, and the height of their streamlines above
the bed decreases monotonically as one moves to the right of the crest.
