The harbor is a broad tidal estuary where several rivers converge before the water pushes out through a narrow main channel between Sullivan’s Island and the Morris Island side. In 1862 the channel was roughly a mile wide at its mouth. It was laced with underwater obstructions: sandbars that shifted with the seasons, shoals that could beach an unwary vessel, and, by the time Smalls made his run, Confederate torpedoes — what we would now call mines — many of which Smalls himself had helped place.
The harbor’s geography was not something you could learn from a chart alone. It had to be learned through practice, through hundreds of passages in different tidal states and different weather and different loads. A wheelman who knew this harbor in his body rather than on paper was a valuable thing to have on any vessel working these waters.
Robert Smalls had been learning Charleston Harbor for years. He was not born here — he was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839, the son of Lydia Polite, an enslaved woman who worked in the household of Henry McKee. But at around age twelve, McKee arranged for him to be hired out to Charleston, a common practice by which an enslaver could profit from an enslaved person’s labor in a city while retaining legal ownership of the person. Smalls was sent to work in Charleston and to remit most of his wages to McKee. He kept about a dollar a week of what he earned.
In Charleston he worked as a hotel waiter, as a street lamplighter, as a longshoreman and a rigger. He worked on the water. He learned to sail. He learned to handle ropes and read currents and read the faces of people who might help him and people who might not. He became, over years of practice and natural aptitude, a skilled wheelman — the person responsible for steering a vessel, navigating it through complex waters, making the constant adjustments of course and speed that keep a ship moving safely. A wheelman was not the same as a captain, but a wheelman who knew a harbor intimately was, in practical terms, often the most valuable person aboard.