The NPS maintains a biographical page for John Small separate from its Robert Smalls page, which is a significant institutional acknowledgment that these were two distinct individuals who both participated in a consequential historical event. The confusion between them is not a minor error; it collapses two people into one and erases John Small’s specific role and his family’s specific risk.
Alfred Gourdine, the second engineer, is named in the NPS account. Abraham Jackson and Gabriel Turner, as deckhands, contributed to the operation of the vessel. Abram Allston, described as an experienced pilot who had been enslaved at Fort Moultrie, manned the wheel during portions of the crossing.
Charles Chisolm, the enslaved crewman of the Etiwan, moved the families to the pickup point before the Planter arrived at North Atlantic Wharf. Without his assistance, the family boarding — which happened in the dark, under circumstances where speed and coordination were essential — would have been more difficult or impossible.
These men took the same risk that Smalls did. They were the same legal category of property. If the escape had failed, they faced the same consequences. That the narrative has centered on Smalls specifically is a function of his leadership role, his maritime skill, his subsequent prominence, and his later documented statements about the escape. It is also a function of how historical memory works: the person whose name recurs across the documentary record accumulates narrative presence that the people who appear in fewer documents do not. John Small was an engineer. Engineers do not appear in harbor pilots’ logbooks or military despatches in the same way that pilots do. The documentary asymmetry does not reflect a moral asymmetry in who took risks.