There were smudgy old maps with names you’d never dare to invent: Pickle Herring Stairs, Gun & Shot Wharf, Horselydown Old Stairs, Tattle Alley.

A few twentieth-century lightermen left memoirs in which they recalled their apprenticeship binding:

I was still getting my ‘river hands’. One very old gentleman (one of the master lightermen) who, from the look of him, had passed the century mark years ago, managed to mumble, ‘Blisters healed, sonny?’ I shook my head and held out my hands, which were puffed-up from all the heavy rowing. There was a general laugh at this, they all thought it blasted funny, except me.

And gave instructions on ‘tapping a cask’:

The majority of men carried ‘screws’ (gimlets) and as cargoes were often wine, rum and gin, the drink was cheap. Tapping a cask could be done without showing any evidence from the outside. ‘Do it clean’ was the maxim, by gently tapping the hoops toward the tapering end, then boring two small holes. After the ‘waxer’ had been drawn, the holes were neatly splined, and the hoops hammered back over the holes and secured.

These stories were from the 1930s, but something told me that nothing had changed all that much for the Company of Watermen and Lightermen since Solomon Wiseman’s day.

I’d always assumed, from the family story, that being a lighter-man was an unskilled job, something you learned on the run, the only qualification being a strong back: like being a builder’s labourer in my own world. When Wiseman was described in the trial as a ‘journeyman lighterman’ I’d taken this to mean a kind of day-labourer, journeying from one job to the next.

It made it easier to be sympathetic. In a world with no social security, no free education, no hope for a poor man, there was Wiseman, rowing his heart out on the Thames, scrounging such work as he could, living on the sweat of his brow until his health gave out—my heart always swelled with indignation at the thought of him so doomed by the accident of birth. He was no angel, but a ‘journeyman lighterman’ without the killer instinct wouldn’t have lasted a week.

Now I was learning that a ‘journeyman’ is by definition someone who has served an apprenticeship. That made it the equivalent of being a plumber or an electrician rather than a builder’s labourer. Not right at the top of the social ladder, perhaps, but not at the bottom by any means, and with the economic leverage of someone working in the closed shop of the guild system.

And yet—if being a journeyman lighterman was the equivalent of being a plumber today, would he have risked death to steal that Brazil wood?

The image of Wiseman was doubling, trebling, quadrupling: the Wiseman who was desperate, for whom the risk of death was worth taking; or someone else, with a skill to sell, a long way from starvation.

Wiseman came and went among the pages of the books, and I was starting to feel more and more earnest and ridiculous, trying to pin him down. Disoriented, too, like standing in the surf and feeling a swell lift you up, weightless, drifting where the sea will take you.