## The USS Onward and What Came Next
The USS Onward was one of the vessels on blockade duty that morning. When its watch spotted the Planter approaching under a white flag in the early morning, the initial response was not immediate welcome. The crew prepared to fire. A vessel approaching the blockade from inside Charleston Harbor under unusual circumstances in the pre-dawn was a potential threat: it could be a Confederate decoy, a fire ship, something intended to damage the blockading fleet.
What stopped the firing was a crewman on the Onward who saw the white flag clearly enough to identify it as a genuine surrender signal. Acting Captain John Frederick Nickels came aboard the Planter.
Smalls’s reported greeting — “Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!” — has been attributed to him in multiple accounts and is cited in NPS materials, though the precise wording and direct attribution vary across sources. The essence of what he communicated was clear and factual: the vessel, the artillery it was carrying, and the people on it were now in Union hands.
Nickels and Smalls then proceeded to Port Royal Harbor, where Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont received the report. What Du Pont acquired that morning was considerably more than a ship.
The Planter was carrying the four artillery pieces loaded at Coles Island, plus ammunition and related hardware. It carried the Confederate captain’s code book — the signals Smalls had memorized now existed in a physical document that Union naval intelligence could use. And it carried Smalls himself, whose detailed knowledge of Charleston Harbor’s defenses was intelligence of a different order: not a document but a person who knew where the torpedoes were laid, which channels were navigable, what Confederate troops remained in which positions.