I met him in 2006 when my wife was the vicar at his local church. He was a man whose work I recognised the shape of, even though it wasn’t mine. His world had been in military software which I believe included MASCOT — the MoD’s method for real-time systems, retired by the time we met, built to prove that software did exactly what it claimed and nothing more. Mine had been mainframes, JSP, the discipline of stating a problem precisely enough that a machine could be trusted with it.
It was he who told me about CANOE: the Campaign to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything, a joke among etymologists about the habit of inventing seafaring explanations for phrases that almost never came from ships. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is really about barrels, not boats. By and large is nautical, but not in the way anyone assumes. Three sheets to the wind is honestly a sailor’s phrase. The others are landlubbers borrowing the sea for a good story.
I’ve been turning CANOE over again recently, in a line of thought that wandered from etymology into a metaphor I didn’t expect to need: all in the same boat, and what happens when the crew realises they have a stowaway who isn’t like them at all.
A boat is a small, closed environment, and its crew know each other’s needs by instinct: how much water, how much rest, how a body fails when it’s pushed too far. Discovering a stranger aboard changes what the crew think they knew about their own boat. If there was already disagreement about the leadership of the crew and existing tension among the crew members about whose job is what, or who deserves which rations, the new arrival may make things worse.
Some of the crew had already begun to whisper that the boat was taking on water. Not enough to panic, just enough to change the way they looked at the planks beneath their feet. A vessel is never simply afloat or sinking; it is always somewhere between the two, and belief fills the gap. When a stranger appears aboard a boat whose fate is already in dispute, he becomes part of the dispute. Every creak of timber becomes a sign, every misstep a confirmation. The crew stop asking what the boat is doing and start asking who is to blame for what they fear it might be doing.
The danger in such moments is not the water but the certainty. A crew convinced the boat is sinking will act as though it is, even when the hull is sound. A crew convinced it is safe will ignore the slow rise of the bilge. The stowaway, dry in ways they cannot name, becomes the test of whether they can pause long enough to separate fear from fact, instinct from truth, and identity from circumstance.
It raises a question the crew never thought to ask when the voyage began: who is meant to watch the water ahead? Someone must scan for icebergs, shoals, the quiet hazards that only reveal themselves to the patient eye. Someone else must keep the horizon in view, because a boat without a horizon is only a raft pretending to have a destination. And someone must steer — not because steering guarantees safety, but because failing to steer guarantees drift.
These roles were once obvious. They belonged to the crew by instinct, divided according to strength, experience, temperament. But instinct falters when the boat’s condition is disputed, when some believe the hull is failing and others believe the danger is imagined. And the dry sapient stowaway, quiet in his difference, complicates the arithmetic further: seeing patterns where the crew see waves, probabilities where they see weather, and consequences where they see tradition. The question of who should steer becomes a question of what steering even means.