A boat in the fog, a bottle cork up close
A boatman spotted what looked like a man coming toward him in a boat. He paddled closer. The object was a bottle cork, floating with the tide.
That is the story George Butler told the naturalist Frank Buckland about a morning off the Spit. Butler was used to taking his small, battered boat out to fish, by night and in rough weather. Fog, he said, was what deceived him.[1]
The surprise is the change of scale. First there was a person and a vessel; at close quarters, there was only a cork. Nothing in Butler’s account gives a measured distance or tells us exactly how the mistake arose. Buckland was recording a boatman’s recollection, not conducting an optics experiment.
The cork had not changed. Butler’s reading of it had. A tiny object had briefly supplied enough of a suggestion for him to see something much larger—and to paddle toward it.
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