Right Under Their Noses

Image by Andrea Femerstrand.

"So how do you keep a secret from the world’s greatest detective? Well do you know? You stick it right in front of him, right under his long pointy nose and wait."

— The Joker, Batman: Arkham City

The safest way to avoid detection in stories is always, well, right under the enemy's nose — the last place they'll ever think to look.

This is true even if the antagonist or whoever the hero is avoiding has all his forces concentrated in an easily avoidable heavily armed complex. Despite the fact that the Sword of Plot Advancement is not to be found there, the hero must encounter the Damsel in Distress somehow.

Even when it would make more sense to avoid the enemy stronghold altogether, the seasoned marksmen who swarm the wilderness are always much more likely to capture our heroes if they attempt to sensibly bushwhack away from the enemy camp, whereas the soft green recruits at the main gate would never imagine someone walking up to the Front Door.

This may extend to...:

• Literally walking up to the Front Door, usually disguised as filthy peasants or a janitor. ("These aren't the droids you are looking for.")
• Charging the fortress (One-Man Army, It's Up to You) on trumped up reasons (Damsel in Distress) when observing from a safe distance might make more sense.
• Navigating through the enemy's moat/sewer system/air vent and discovering something fascinating to move the plot along when the heroes could have avoided the place entirely.
• Geographic or logistical hurdles require the Hero to sneak past a checkpoint. The Mooks come perilously close to detecting the hero (It's Probably Nothing).
• Accidentally encountering the Big Bad while disguised as someone else (Hey, Wait!)
• Actively seeking out the most heavily guarded facility on the grounds that "it's the last place they'll expect to find us!!"

Compare Hidden in Plain Sight, Needle in a Needle Stack. See also Walk into Mordor, We Need a Distraction, Throwing the Distraction, So Much for Stealth.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Bleach:
  • Aizen and his cronies operate to subvert the Gotei 13 this way. He puts up the act so well that the captain is the only person suspicious of him.
  • Similarly, guess where the bad guys' lair is after the Time Skip? Answer: in the literal shadows of the Seireitei.

Fan Works

• While waiting for the Inquisition forces to arrive in Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium, their Warden contact goes to Adamant Fortress to spy on the massing Grey Wardens. He's wearing his uniform with the helmet closed, counting on the generic appearance to keep him from being discovered, and it works perfectly.
• In Delenda Est, Harry Ashworth figures out a way to steal someone's wand, while they're holding it, without them even noticing it's gone. This skill comes in handy when Harry steals Voldemort's wand in the middle of their duel.
• In Harry Tano, Ahsoka Tano is teleported from Coruscant to Privet Drive, where she finds and later adopts a then 4-year-old Harry Potter before running away into the night, which leads to a chain of events happening that affects the Wizarding World: namely that Sirius Black is exonerated and is made the executor of the Potter Family Estates: including a cottage located in Cornwall that he gives to Remus Lupin. Sirius then spends the next seven years searching the world for where his Godson had disappeared to. As it turned out, Ahsoka and Harry were spending those seven years living in a Cove in Cornwall: directly beneath the same Potter Estate Remus was living at; having spent all that time learning the ways of The Force and becoming urban legends for the nearby villages.
• Tarkin's Fist: Jason Bogan, following his escape from Imperial Concentration Camp 1138, manages to hide out in Imperial society on Mars in plain sight thanks to a fake identity created and inserted into the Imperial database by a criminal slicer he befriends. The fake identity is so convincing that he is unwittingly drafted into the Imperial Army.
• The Victors Project: In Arrow, the only survivors of Redfern who Lyme finds are hiding in the hidden cellar of a pub while several of the people who were sent to massacre the villagers are obliviously celebrating directly above them.

Films — Live-Action

• At the start of The Assignment (1997), a disguised Carlos the Jackal recognizes CIA agent Jack Shaw sitting at a Paris cafe, walks right up to him and borrows a light, then tosses a hand grenade into the café. Shaw survived, and a large part of his motivation throughout the movie is to avenge the humiliation of having missed Europe's most wanted terrorist when he was literally right under his nose.
• The Baker Street Dozen: The culprit after the microfilm in Sherlock Holmes Goes to Washington is pretty sore when he realizes that he ended up with it late in the film but never realized it.
• In The Cannonball Run, racers J.J. and Victor sneak their ambulance van through a police road block on the back of a "low-boy" carrier, covered only with a tarp and looking exactly like a van covered with a tarp.
• Carry On Spying: The headquarters of the evil S.T.E.N.C.H organisation is right under the headquarters of the British Secret Service where the spies started their mission. After the Elaborate Underground Base blows up, the heroes take the elevator to the surface and emerge from a closet in Da Chief's office.
• In Castaway on the Moon, Seong-geun gets marooned on a Deserted Island—under a bridge, in the middle of the Han River, in the middle of Seoul. No one driving the bridge or sailing the river ever sees him, because no one's supposed to be there.
• Charlie Muffin ends with Charlie (having betrayed British Intelligence in revenge for them setting him up to be killed) relaxing with his wife in a hotel in Brighton, England. "They'll look all over the world, but they won't look here." In the novels the movie is based on however, Charlie does eventually get caught.
• Conquest of the Planet of the Apes has the main villain making this remark about having owned Caesar, the chimp everyone was searching for, all along.
• In The Gumball Rally, one of the teams evades a roadblock by driving into a truck.
• Heroes of Sung revolves around a group of heroes who needs to keep a MacGuffin — an all-important Imperial seal — away from the main villain, a martial arts traitor. Nonetheless, the villain managed to snag the seal for himself with his Epic Flail, whose tip ends in a bronze claw, right in front of all three of the main protagonists! In all fairness, the sole Action Girl is actively mourning her recently dead father, and her two male compatriots are trying to console her, and the villain does the theft when all three of their backs are turned for two seconds.
• While attempting to avoid pursuit by Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and his father go through Berlin to get the journal back. They manage to run into Adolf Hitler... who proceeds to write his autograph in it (and this is after Hitler has "declared war on the Jones boys", as the Big Bad of the film puts it).
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Pippin suggests this as reason for Treebeard to take him and Merry back towards Isengard; of course, he had other reasons for wanting Treebeard to see Isengard close-up.
  Pippin: If we go south, we can slip past Saruman unnoticed. The closer we are to danger, the farther we are from harm!
  Treebeard: That... doesn't make any sense to me! Then again... you are very small. South it is, then!
• Rescuers: Stories of Courage: One of the heroes from Two Women lives just a hundred meters from a Gestapo headquarters while helping people the Nazis are chasing.
• In any Robin Hood film, the titular hero will sneak his entire band into Nottingham dressed as peasants.
• Shenandoah: Carter, the boy, and their companions wait until the guards are busy shooting after whoever inevitably tries to escape by swimming across the river, then go into the water themselves but cling to the river bank, just out of sight of the nearby guards, and then slowly move off to the side until they're out of sight rather than cross the river.
• In Silver Lode, Ballard manages to sneak past everyone looking for him in the middle of the town simply by carrying a barrel over his shoulder such that his face is obscured.
• Star Wars:
  • Done on several occasions, most notably when Han hides by sticking the Falcon on the back of a Star Destroyer.
  • Although the biggest one, in light of the prequel trilogy, still has to be the decision to hide Luke on his father's home planet under his own name with his only known relatives. Obi-Wan was banking a lot on the idea that Vader would never want to go to Tatooine ever again.^note Vader also had reason to believe that Padme died before the children were born, and wasn't actively looking.
• In Willow, when Princess Elora Danaan is born in the beginning, her mother begs the midwife to get the baby out of the dungeon before the evil Queen Bavmorda comes to see her. The midwife hides the child in the basket of dirty linens she has to take with her, and literally carries the concealed baby out of the dungeon right past the Queen.
• In The Witches (1990), Luke hides behind a folding screen during the witches' meeting, which does not actually give him good cover, because the screen has several gaps, especially the one he looks through. Several times the camera zooms in on him, as if he is about to be spotted.
• Zorro. Swashbucklers in general seem to be fond of this.

Literature

• 20 Years After: Having escaped from Mazarin's imprisonment (with Mazarin hostage no less), d'Artagnan and co. escape to one of Porthos' castles, when they convince the Cardinal to yield to the rebellious faction's demands (which was already more or less agreed on) and a few demands the musketeers make for themselves. Then he cheerfully returns to Paris to inform the Queen of what's happening, and goes through without trouble since the guard are looking for a mounted troop sixty strong fleeing like hell away from Paris, and not a lone man going back towards Paris.
• In the seventh Alex Rider book, Snakehead, Alex is trapped on a boat filled with guards searching for him, and it'll be hours before they reach shore and he has a chance to escape. He goes for Refuge in Audacity and spends hours hiding under the villain's bed.
• The J.A. Johnstone western story Assault of the Mountain Man has this done twice to the murderous outlaw gang during the same train robbery. First, the messenger riding with the safe opens the safe before the outlaws reach the car and hides almost all of the money inside of it under another crate in the car, and closes the safe again with just few hundred dollars left. When the train robbers open the safe, they assume that the paltry money in there is all the money in the express car. Then when they try to rob the passengers, the conductor and Julius the African-American porter have convinced all of the passengers to keep a couple dollars a piece and give the rest of their money for Julius to hide under his shirt. Sure enough, the frustrated robbers collect almost no money from the passengers, even after searching several they are convinced have more money hidden, all the while never bothering to search the African-American porter, who they even have following them to carry the bag collecting any money the passengers do have. The newspaper headlines reporting on the robbery the next day do not shy away from poking at how the robbers were fooled in this manner not once, but twice.
• In one book of The Borrible Trilogy, one of the recruits for a new adventure is noted for the clever place he's made his hideout, to avoid the Borrible-hunting police: he lives in a disused basement underneath the police station.
• The title character of the Wooden Ships and Iron Men book Captain Caution, an American privateer, insists he doesn't believe in taking chances. His French friend is incredulous: sailing right into a British-held port and anchoring where the fort's guns will have a perfect shot at him isn't taking chances? Of course not; since he made himself so totally vulnerable to them, the British know he can't be an American coming in to capture one of the ships already in port. And that night, he sneaks a crew aboard...
• Ciaphas Cain always manages to foil the enemy's application of this trope, usually by heading to the sector least likely to see action (to the confusion of the underlings, who all believe in his gung-ho HERO OF THE IMPERIUM persona). This results in him stumbling on a tunnel leading to the enemy, an infiltration unit, or daemonic summoning ritual in progress, and therefore putting his life even further at risk than if he'd gone to the front line. One of his Mauve Shirts has a similar ability, her bad luck leading to discover previously-unseen enemies or traps.
• Sultan Mehmed, Vlad Tepes' Islamic enemy in Count and Countess, easily evades all of Vlad's military plans just by hiding out in a church town in the middle of Romania. Vlad does catch up with him in the end.
• In the first Enola Holmes book, Enola, a runaway, is discovered by her brother. When she shakes him again, he spends all night out scouring the city for her, but she successfully escapes by hiding in his house. (When she departs, she's able to use some of his disguise supplies to ensure she won't be spotted.)
• In the 1958 sci-fi thriller Gold in the Sky by Alan E. Nourse, our hero escapes the minions of an evil asteroid mining corporation by clamping himself to the outside of their spacecraft in magnetic boots. He then roams about The Mothership using an Air-Vent Passageway and then belatedly realizes he's been carrying the MacGuffin the villains have been searching for, an alien Ray Gun hidden in his father's gun holster.
• In Harry Turtledove's Great War trilogy, a Confederate submarine commander is able to sail, unsubmerged, within sight of a Union fleet at New York City, protected only by audacity and the fact that the Confederate national flag (as opposed to the well-known battle flag) looks a lot like the Stars and Stripes from a distance. Turtledove has also featured Jewish characters in other series escaping persecution in Nazi Germany by joining the Wehrmacht or even the SS under a false identity.
• "Kriegblut's Disguise" by Lord Dunsany: The titular antagonist, a German master spy during World War II, escapes detection until an investigator realizes he hasn't been hiding at all — he's one of the obvious Germans, "clicking his heels and talking with a thick accent", that Scotland Yard had immediately identified but written off as an Overt Operative of no consequence.
• The Last Unicorn:
  • King Haggard is the one responsible for the disappearance of almost all of the unicorns of the world. Schmendrick (accidentally) hides the eponymous last unicorn right in front of Haggard by disguising her as a human woman. It drives Haggard crazy for some time because he knows something isn't right about "Lady Amalthea", but he can't quite figure out what.
  • Haggard himself has hidden his captive unicorns in the sea just outside his castle. Even though our protagonists live as his 'guests' for several weeks (at the least), they don't notice until Haggard himself points it out.
• Invoked in The Legend of Sun Knight when the Sun Knight has to hide his newly undead best friend from his fellow knights of the Holy Temple, so he hides him in the Holy Temple itself; after all, who would believe that an undead could have made it past all their defenses without raising an alarm?
• The Lord of the Rings: This is explicitly how Sam and Frodo succeed (helped by Aragorn's army besieging the Black Gate at the same time, getting all the orcs out of the way). After all, who in their right mind would take the one artifact Sauron needs to rule the world right to his doorstep? Author J. R. R. Tolkien at one point tried to make up an excuse for them to sneak into Minas Morgul, but thought better of it.
• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, the protagonists choose to stage their revolution right in The Empire's capital city. The argument is that it's the last place anyone would expect them to do it, and also that it has the most resources for their use.
• Sherlock Holmes: At the end of "Charles Augustus Milverton", Lestrade asks for help with the case, as the criminals were almost caught. Holmes and Watson, who were those criminals, cheerfully give him a Sarcastic Confession before Holmes refuses to take the case (they were present at the murder, and Holmes even identified her, but given what an utter Asshole Victim Milverton was he won't lift a finger to help catch her).
• In The Sherwood Ring, British soldier Peaceable Sherwood takes his hidden militia to crash for the winter at... the shut-up-for-the-war house of the soldier assigned to capturing him, Richard Grahame. Richard is unpleasantly surprised when he makes the mistake of coming over to the house to rummage around for a Christmas gift for his girlfriend.
• In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Jim and Will hide in a sewer grate not more than ten feet away from where the Circus of Fear is parading with the reasoning that the carnival folks won't think to look in so obvious a place. They still have a couple of very close calls, though, and would in fact have been discovered by the Dust Witch's Super-Senses if Will's father Charles hadn't intervened.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • The legend of Bael the Bard says that when he stole away Lord Stark's daughter, they hid in the Winterfell crypts. No one found them for years.
  • Bran and his company have the same idea and hide from Theon Greyjoy by doubling back and hiding in the crypts under Winterfell.
  • In The Princess and the Queen, when Rhaenyra storms King's Landing, Aegon II hides in the last place she would ever think to look: in Dragonstone, her own home.
• The Stainless Steel Rat: In the first story, Jim escapes a planetwide dragnet by hiding in a building just a few blocks away from where he escaped. Unfortunately, the authorities quickly track him down there, because he's being pursued by the Special Corps whose agents consist of former criminals who think just like he does.
• In Star Trek: Vulcan's Heart, during the early stages of the revolution on Romulus, Spock proposes a plan along these lines:
  Ruanek: Audacious, hells, yes! But how in the name of all those hells are you going to get in? Just walk right up and order the gates to open?
  Spock: Precisely.
• A Study in Emerald: According to the detective, far from fleeing the country, Holmes and Watson are currently in London itself (the Rookery specifically, where the police won't go except in huge numbers), waiting for the manhunt to die down.
• Cassy and Emmeline escape from Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin by running into the swamps while leaving an obvious trail, then sneaking back to the house and letting the searchers run themselves ragged looking for them. They make their true escape a couple of days later.

Live-Action TV

• Breaking Bad:
  • The ruthless drug kingpin of the American southwest, Gus Fring presents himself as a simple chicken shop owner with charities going to the DEA and Gus also being a special guest to some of their functions. When the truth about his true life comes out, the head of the DEA (who was a personal friend to Gus) is fired due to jeopardizing their secrets.
  • Similarly, Hank devotes most of his on-screen career and resources into busting Heisenberg, the new and upcoming meth cook who puts out one of the purest and addictive batch of meth ever, who grows more dangerous and ambitious every day. Little does he know that Heisenberg is none other than his own brother-in-law, Villain Protagonist Walter White, with Walt specifically using his connections to stay two steps ahead in the Heisenberg case, though it's more Underestimating Badassery in Hank's case. When Walt slips up and Hank accidentally discovers his secret, he's understandably heart-broken and utterly furious upon being duped by a close family member for so long.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The villains tend to hide from the heroes this way.
  • In Season 1, it is revealed that the Hellmouth is in fact located directly underneath the library where Buffy and the Scooby Gang hang out and make their plans. Given that The Master was trapped in the Hellmouth for all of the first season, it is thus implied that the Big Bad had been hiding under the heroes' noses the whole time, though it's unclear if he's aware of the fact.
  • In Season 5, Glory looks like a regular human (albeit with super strength), so she can walk around in public without anyone suspecting anything, even buying magic artifacts from The Magic Box while the Scoobies are there, trying to research her with only a vague description of what she looks like.
  • Comes up again in the last season in the final episodes. Buffy has a verbal sparring match with Caleb at the rebuilt high-school (the site of the Hellmouth once again) and realizes that the villains SHOULD be fortifying the position in preparation for opening it up and letting out the army of super-vamps. But they aren't. Why? Because they have fortified an old winery where they had already sprung a trap on Buffy and the potentials. Again, why? Because there really is something even more important to the coming battle buried right under the winery.
• Game of Thrones: Where has Gendry being staying all this time after his departure on Season 3? In King's Landing, of course, back at the forge in Flea Bottom making weapons for the Lannister army.
• In Hogan's Heroes, this trope is the only half-way plausible explanation of how Hogan's headquarters could stay hidden beyond manipulating Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz. This depends heavily on the episode; in the first season especially, Schultz is openly aiding them, and Klink has been heavily implied to be an Allied agent a few times.
• In Keeping Up Appearances, Richard confesses to not noticing something really obvious.
  "It's no good asking me. I didn't even notice when your father was on fire."
• In Series 2 of Marcella, the Serial Killer has managed to hide the body of one of their victims inside the very police station the main character works at, by dumping it in the maintenance compartment of an elevator shaft.
• In Season 18 of the Dutch version of The Mole, one challenge had the host ask each contestant a series of questions starting with "Do you want to know who the Mole is?" While the contestants were answering these questions, the Mole casually strolled past them in plain sight with their face completely uncovered. All the contestants had to do to find out the Mole's identity was to turn their heads slightly to the left, but they were all so busy focusing on the board with the questions that not a single one of them did.
• In the Supernatural episode "What Is and What Should Never Be", Dean takes the Wishverse Sam to the djinn's lair to confront the djinn, and at one point they are literally hiding under the djinn's nose as they hide under an open metal frame staircase as the djinn walks up the steps.
• Wallenberg: A Hero's Story: The whole rescue operation happens right under the noses of the Nazis and Arrow Cross.
• In the Wishbone episode "The Pawloined Paper," adapting "The Purloined Letter", the real life subplot (that always mirrors the adapted story in some way) has the dog Wishbone hide from a mob of angry people chasing him by hiding under the lap blanket of a handicapped woman who then wheels past the mob without them paying any attention to her.

Newspaper Comics

• In one strip of Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin is hiding from his mother, who is trying to get him to take a bath. Calvin avoids being caught by hiding in the (empty) bathtub.
  Calvin: She'll never look here.

Video Games

• The entirety of Ashen is spent searching for the titular being. When at last you discover its location, it turns out that it's in the Wrinkled Grotto, one of the first places in the game you gain access to, and one many players might have even stumbled into by accident.
• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: In the modern-day portions of the game, you (as the point of view character) interact with a cell of Assassins who are hiding from the international Templar manhunt targeting them. How do they hide? By working openly in the lobby of Abstergo Entertainment, a subsidiary of the very company that is the front for the Templars.
• In Batman: Arkham City, this is spoken word for word by the Joker, twice. The first is after you fiddle with the audio log from a phone call he gives you. The second time is Batman remembering the previous as a clue to the reveal of the Joker not only still being very sick and dying, but that Clayface has been masquerading as the Joker for some time.
• In Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, it turns out that Anita's missing outlaw husband and the mysterious, scarred stranger sitting in her bar are one and the same. He didn't want to reveal himself because firstly, he's still wanted by the law; and secondly, he thought Anita would reject him because of his disfigurement.
• One Dungeon Keeper II level pits the Keeper against an enemy with a vastly superior subterranean fortress and army. The Keeper levels the field by stealing them piece by piece, sealing rooms away from the enemy using magically hidden doors and ambushing soldiers to torture into switching sides.
• Used in both of the first two Enigmatis games.
  • In the first game, Detective Hamilton spends thirty years in the town of Maple Creek, disguised as a secretive hermit, in order to gather intel on the Big Bad. In this case, it's unclear whether his target is really unaware of his presence or if he's just being very studiously ignored.
  • In the second game's bonus chapter, a young woman skulks around the area where her companions are imprisoned, and even tells herself that "The closer to danger, the farther from harm," reasoning that she won't be noticed because no one expects her to be there. Unlike the first example, she is horribly wrong.
• In Final Fantasy XII, the hero party discusses this trope before infiltrating their enemies' capital city.
  Penelo: But what about once we're inside? Won't the city watch find us?
  Ashe: We'll do what we can to blend into the crowd. Our names may be notorious, but our faces are not far-known.
  Vaan: True, true. You're our princess, and we didn't even recognize you.
  Ashe: [flatly] I noticed.
• In Team Fortress 2, if the Spy uses the Box Trot taunt, he can potentially blend in with the surroundings — the last place "normal" players think to look. What makes this tactic truly broken is that unlike while Cloaking or Disguises, the Spy can still capture objectives in this manner or block the enemy from capturing while Boxtrotting.

Web Original

• A Corollary Two example in Death by Cliché. It's even lampshaded somewhat by the main character. Given that the entire thing is a deconstruction of bad GM-ing and poor storytelling, this isn't particularly surprising.
• Played with in Irregular Webcomic! when Darth Vader learns that one downside of the Death Star's gratuitous interior space is that just about anybody can set up shop in it.
• During a video of Muselk playing Prop Hunt in Team Fortress 2, Muselk encounters a teammate named Publo who should have been turned into an object to hide from the enemy team, but instead has been turned into a Pyro. Muselk concludes that this is the single worst disguise in all of Prop Hunt, and assumes that Publo is standing in the open because he has accepted his doom. A few minutes later, Muselk notices that every enemy has failed to notice Publo, because they're too focused on looking for players disguised as objects and hiding, and thus Publo is the only player who doesn't get found.
• RWBY villain Cinder Fall's way of destroying Beacon Academy? Having her and her associates (minus Torchwick) literally be contestants in the Vytal Festival as foreign academy students, this helps her plan everything else up to the end of Volume 3.
• Inverted in Vaguely Recalling JoJo; the villain DIO is constantly following Jotaro's group, but they don't seem to spot him until the plot calls for it.

Western Animation

• Subverted in Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Gaang tries to infiltrate a royal party in order to get close to the Earth King and inform him that the Fire Nation is getting increasingly close to victory over the Earth Kingdom. Unfortunately, the very nice man who lets them into the party is the head of the Da Li, the Secret Police intent on making everyone in Ba Sing Se unaware that there's a war in the first place.

Real Life

• A man who was seriously wanted by the FBI was working as a dishwasher in a cafeteria. In Washington, DC. In the basement of FBI headquarters.
• Fugitive LAPD officer Chris Dorner holed up in a Big Bear cabin less than 200 yards from the police outpost coordinating the manhunt for him.
• General Antoine Lavallette was arrested in 1815 for having supported Napoléon Bonaparte and managed to escape the Conciergerie with the help of his wife, trading clothes with her. Some of his friends hid him in an attic of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a few hundred metres away from the palace of the King who wanted him dead.
• Osama bin Laden was quite possibly the most wanted man on earth for ten years. It was widely assumed that he was living in a cave in the most remote parts of Afghanistan to avoid capture. As it turns out, he was living in a very nice Pakistani suburb, about a mile from Pakistan's most prominent military academy. There's debate as to whether it was this trope, or whether the Pakistani government simply had no interest in knowing that he was there.
• Robert Smalls was an American slave who was forced into service on a Confederate transport ship during the Civil War. When the ship's officers went into town for the night, Smalls and the other slaves in the crew commandeered the ship and boldly sailed out of Charleston Harbor to defect to the Union. The plan worked because Smalls had put on a captain's uniform and memorized the correct hand signals to use at the multiple Confederate checkpoints in the harbor.

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