On New Year’s Day 1739 a French captain, Jean-Baptiste Bouvet, saw land through fog in the far South Atlantic and took it for a cape of the great southern continent everyone expected to find. He wrote down where it was, and the position was wrong. Thirty-odd years later James Cook sailed to the spot, found open sea, and decided Bouvet had probably mistaken an iceberg for land. Which was a fair conclusion, and also wrong. In 1808 a whaler came across the island, sailed all the way round it and gave it his own name. It is still there, mostly under ice, about as far from anywhere as an island gets. What I like is that both mistakes were careful ones: Bouvet saw something real and put it in the wrong place, and Cook looked in exactly the right place for something that had never been there.