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Dolphin Head’s rich history and dazzling scenery slips deeper and deeper into the sea with every passing year.
William Elliott rose early in his Myrtle Bank Plantation home on a steamy summer morning of 1808. He proudly looked across his fields of snowy-white sea island cotton, spanning 1,000 acres on the northern tip of Hilton Head Island. His slaves were already working their tasks.
A solitary vulture, silent and coal-black, circled low overhead. This specter bothered Elliott, and he turned to walk to the beach. He strode purposefully for 15 minutes under an archway of live oaks, pecan trees and well-tended bayberry shrubs, and descended the gradual slope to the wave-scoured shore of Port Royal Sound. Elliott called this bluff beach Dolphin Head. Here he found solace by the sea.
Later that day William Elliott drowned in a boating accident in the sound. His beloved Dolphin Head was passing away too — only more slowly.
The Great Rising
Since the end of the Wisconsin “Ice Age” over 18,000 years ago, Earth’s oceans have risen and moved inland. Using the Charleston-Hilton Head Island-Georgia barrier island coast as reference, geologists have recorded an average rise in sea level of 350 feet. Moreover, the ocean has migrated nearly 70 miles inland from the Continental Shelf and across the relatively shallow South Atlantic Bight — the bay-shaped shoreline of the southeast coast. The cause for long-term sea level rise include the warming climate, melting of continental and glacial ice, subsidence of the ocean floor, and the gorilla in the closet: heat-trapping carbon emissions from human activities.
If you visit Dolphin Head you can see the effects of this centuries-long rising. Erosion was already underway when William Elliott strolled on his beloved beach, but he was walking on dry sandy shoreline that is now submerged over 100 yards offshore, probably more. Tidal currents, rising by the year, relentlessly gouged away the headland, cleaving cliff-like bluffs festooned with dangling tree roots to nowhere. Erosion was merciless, and huge shade trees fell like wooden soldiers on the beach. Eventually, Elliott’s Myrtle Bank home washed into the sea.
For many years, you could visit the Dolphin Head overlook in Hilton Head Plantation. At low tide you would see the tabby (oyster shell masonry) footings of the house plopped offshore in a tidal pool visited by mud snails, fiddler crabs and curious shorebirds. Nearby stood a quaint children’s playground hand-crafted from driftwood by the artist Wayne Edwards. Now Elliott’s tabby and Edwards’ sculpture are long-gone, claimed at last by the rising sea.
Man Proposes, Nature Disposes
The great conservationist John Muir said: In nature everything is hitched together. Even a well-intentioned action in one place can cause an impact somewhere else. Dolphin Head is a prime example. In recent years the Hilton Head Plantation property owners installed riprap — a sloped seawall of big rocks — to protect their recreation area and nearby homes from further erosion. The rocks are doing their job, for now. But at what cost to the environment?
Riprap, bulkheads, breakwaters and the like divert the energy and flow of water to the nearest unprotected area of the shore. At Dolphin Head this happens to be the beach leading to Pine Island, the true northernmost point on Hilton Head Island. As recently as the 1970s this crescent-shaped promontory was connected to Dolphin Head by rows of dunes rife with golden sea oats, wildflowers and shrubs, palmettos, and healthy short-leaf pines. After the riprap was installed, Pine Island and its beach eroded significantly. The trees fell. Beach sand washed away. Nor’easters and spring tides plowed through the dunes, smothering productive salt marsh to the lee with sand and debris. Eventually, the community had to fund “nourishing” this beach with new sand.
But rising sea level is the cause, and riprap the culprit, for the erosion of Dolphin Head. The business of engineering the shoreline is like dialysis: The machine helps for a while, but you must go back to the machine again and again.
What if William Elliott has a hand in this, too? Once, Dolphin Head was his domain. The sea took his life. Maybe his spirit returns with the rising tides to reclaim the land that was his.
How to get there: Dolphin Head
To reach Dolphin Head, take the Squire Pope entrance into Hilton Head Plantation, then follow Seabrook Drive to Dolphin Head Drive (it will be on your right). Dolphin Head Drive ends in a loop at the overlook.
Photo by Jody Campbell
