Captain William Hilton and the Naming of the Island

The island you are on has carried a European name since the autumn of sixteen sixty three. On September twenty eighth of that year, a ship called the Adventure, sailing under orders from a group of merchants in Barbados, rounded the southern tip of what would become South Carolina and spotted a distinctive headland at the mouth of a sound. The captain of the Adventure was a mariner named William Hilton, and the mapmakers who recorded his voyage named that headland Hilton's Headland.

Hilton had been sent to explore lands recently granted by King Charles the Second to eight English Lords Proprietors, the men who were establishing what would become the colony of Carolina. His instructions were to scout the coast and assess what was there. He spent several days on and around the island, noting the tall trees, the rich soil, the clear fresh water, and what he called sweet air.

In sixteen sixty four, an account of his voyage was published in London, making it one of the first written descriptions of the South Carolina coast. The name Hilton's Headland was shortened over the following decades to Hilton Head, and it has remained ever since. William Hilton himself returned to Barbados and spent the rest of his life as a sea captain.

He did not colonize the land he reported on. Colonel John Barnwell received a land grant on the island from the Lords Proprietors in seventeen seventeen. So the name on every map belongs to a man who spent a few days here, looked around, wrote a report, and sailed away, an accident of cartographic memory that has lasted more than three hundred and sixty years.