Hilton Head Island, South Carolina: A Sea Captain's Headland

The “Head” in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, is a headland: a wooded bluff that by 1666 was called Hilton Head, after Captain William Hilton. The island took its name from the bluff, and the town took its name from the island.

The Adventure sails from Barbados

William Hilton was a ship captain “of the island of Barbados,” as the historian Alexander S. Salley Jr. describes him in a 1911 collection of early Carolina narratives. In 1663, planters on Barbados sent him out as commander of the ship Adventure, along with Captain Anthony Long and Peter Fabian, to explore the coast south of Cape Fear. They sailed from Spikes Bay on August 10, 1663, and sighted land on August 26.

Hilton’s report came out in London in 1664 under the title A Relation of a Discovery lately made on the Coast of Florida. In it he gives sailing directions into Port Royal. On the southwest side of the entrance, he writes, “the said head-land is bluft, and seems steep, as though the trees hung over the water.” If you’ve wondered what a “head” is doing in the name, that’s it: a headland, which Salley describes as “a promontory extending into Port Royal Sound.”

“Called from the first discoverer”

Three years later, in the summer of 1666, Robert Sandford came down the coast on an exploring trip for the English settlement at Cape Fear, and he sailed past the same bluff. His account, also printed by Salley, describes “the Southermost Cape or head land without Port Royall, called from the first discoverer Hilton Head.” He saw it the way Hilton did: “bluffe, with trees large and tall.”

“First discoverer” was generous. Salley points out in a footnote that Port Royal itself was named by the French explorer Jean Ribault back in 1562. But Hilton was the Englishman who charted the way in and wrote it up, and his name stayed on the bluff. Salley put it plainly: Hilton’s name “has been preserved” in that promontory, “known as Hilton Head, and by an island from which this head juts out, known as Hilton Head Island.”

Lost in a federal book

Henry Gannett, compiling place names for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, didn’t quite get it right. His entry reads “Hiltonhead; village in Beaufort County, North Carolina,” and says it was “said to have been named for the captain of the ship in which Colonel Sayle came over to make discoveries.” There is a Beaufort County in North Carolina, but Hilton Head sits in the one in South Carolina. The ship part doesn’t line up either. Gannett doesn’t name the captain, and David Ramsay’s 1809 history of the state dates Sayle’s own trip to look over the coast to 1667. By then Sandford had already called the bluff Hilton Head, in 1666, and Hilton’s pamphlet puts his voyage in 1663. Sayle is better known for what came next: he was the first governor of the 1670 colony that founded Charles Town, today’s Charleston. So if you go looking for Hilton Head in Gannett’s book, you’ll find it filed under the wrong Carolina.

Sources & further reading

• Alexander S. Salley Jr., ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708 (1911). Salley’s introduction to Hilton’s Relation: Hilton “of the island of Barbados,” the ship Adventure, Long and Fabian, sailing from Spikes Bay on August 10, 1663, arrival on August 26, the pamphlet printed in London in 1664, and the name “preserved” in Hilton Head and Hilton Head Island (pp. 33–36); Hilton’s own text and the footnote on Ribault and Port Royal (pp. 37–38); the “head-land” that “is bluft, and seems steep, as though the trees hung over the water” (p. 43); Sandford’s Relation of 1666, “called from the first discoverer Hilton Head” and “bluffe, with trees large and tall” (p. 98).
• Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government (1897). Hilton’s 1663 voyage (McCrady calls the ship the Adventurer) and his map of the coast (pp. 71–72, 85); the colony of 1670 (p. 126).
• David Ramsay, The History of South-Carolina, vol. 1 (1809). The Proprietors sent William Sayle to look over the coast in 1667; Sayle as the colony’s first governor, landing in 1670 and founding the first Charles Town on the Ashley (pp. 33–34).
• Arthur Mazyck, Guide to Charleston Illustrated (1875). The expedition under Colonel Sayle as the first to make a permanent settlement (p. 8).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The “Hiltonhead” entry placed in “Beaufort County, North Carolina” (p. 157), and the separate entry for Beaufort County, North Carolina.
• GNIS feature 1246002 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for the town of Hilton Head Island in Beaufort County.