Wiseman’s was quite a long trial. It was complicated in its details, but the outline was simple enough. He was thirty years old, a ‘lighterman’ on the Thames, in the employ of one Matthias Prime Lucas. On April 10, 1804, Wiseman took Lucas’s lighter—some kind of small boat, I assumed—down to a ship at Horseleydown and loaded it with valuable ‘Brazil wood’. He was supposed to take it up-river to Three Cranes Wharf and unload it there.

Around midnight my great-great-great grandfather rowed to Three Cranes Wharf with the wood. It was a very dark night and he didn’t know that Lucas, along with some other men, was following him in another boat. Lucas had obviously been tipped off.

At Three Cranes Wharf, Wiseman tied the lighter up and climbed onto the wharf. Lucas heard him call out ‘Ned!’ and say, ‘Damn your eyes, Ned, why did not you come down to lend a hand with the lighter’, and someone answered that he ‘could not come any sooner, he come as soon as he could’.

Wiseman and Ned started to unload the Brazil wood—but instead of putting it up on the wharf, they were moving it into another boat.

Lucas and his friends heard it all: ‘The next sound I heard was, apparently to me, as though a log of wood was scraping over the gunnel of the lighter, as if a person was easing it down, we then heard a hollow sound as if it was set down on the floor at the bottom of the barge.’

They waited until a few pieces of wood had been moved, then they rushed out of their hiding-place. Lucas described what happened next: ‘I struck at Wiseman with a small hanger; he retreated back from me, and said, pray do not, for God’s sake, or words to that effect; I did not attempt to pursue the blow, but thought of closing with him, and taking him by the collar; I sprang towards him, the oars of the barge were then lying sloping from the fore-beam, and…I did not observe the oars; I fell over the oars, and he jumped into a little boat.’

But Lucas had laid his plans well, and had an employee, Richard Rowey, waiting in a small boat nearby. Rowey recalled: ‘I heard Mr Lucas’s voice calling out, Rowey; after which I discovered a boat coming from where the lighter lay… I followed them, and when they came to Crawshay’s wharf…I got on board of theirs; one man jumped overboard; I told him I would shoot him, if he attempted to make his escape. Not hearing any more of him, I supposed he was drowned.’

I laughed aloud at this matter-of-fact tone. In the hushed air of the library it seemed a loud noise, rupturing the calm of books and papers with rude life. At his desk the librarian lifted his head and looked at me, and the woman at the next table gave a little cough.

Rowey was still talking. ‘I turned my attention to the prisoner at the bar; he exclaimed, for God’s sake, Mr Rowey, have mercy, you know the consequence, or something to that effect; he then stepped on the aft athwart of the boat, and made a spring into the river; he got hold of my boat, which I had left, and made his escape.’