British naval officer and explorer Philip Carteret (1733 – 1796) was the younger son of Charles de Carteret, seigneur of Trinity Manor. He was fourteen when he left Jersey to embark on a naval career.
He started as an officer's servant aboard the Salisbury, then followed John Byron through successive commands: the 50-gun fourth-rate HMS St Albans (1751 – 52), the 60-gun fourth-rate HMS Augusta (1753) and the 70-gun third rate Vanguard (1753 – 57). He passed his Lieutenant's examination in 1755 and served on the 48-gun fourth rate Guernsey on the Mediterranean Station (1757-58).
While he could have left the Navy after he inherited the family estate when his elder brother died in 1761, Carteret remained at sea. As a lieutenant in the Dolphin, he took part in John Byron's voyage of circumnavigation (June 1764 – May 1766).
On the Dolphin's return, Carteret was promoted to Commander in May 1766. He was given the command of the fourteen guns sixth-rate sloop Swallow. Decrepit and poorly fitted out, the undermanned vessel would accompany Samuel Wallis in the Dolphin on another venture into the South Pacific.
Carteret was perfectly aware of his new command's inadequacies and lost no opportunity of advising his superiors of them. Still, while his complaints brought a few improvements, they probably damaged his subsequent career by souring his reputation among those who allocated commands and professional opportunities at the Admiralty.
Carteret's concerns centred on the thirty-year-old sloop's seaworthiness. He believed she would be hard-pressed to reach the Falklands, let alone make the tortuous passage through the Straits of Magellan.
The Admiralty officials refused his requests for equipment. Concerns about supplies produced assurances that they had been provided and were available from the Dolphin and the storeship that would accompany the two warships.
When they reached the Straits of Magellan, it took seventeen weeks of struggle against contrary winds to make the passage. The under-officered and ill-equipped Swallow continuously lagged behind her companions. When Carteret urged that she be sent home, Wallis replied that their orders tasked the Swallow with accompanying the Dolphin, so she would have to do so for as long as possible.
While he assured Carteret that he would heave to when Swallow fell behind and offer assistance if necessary, Wallis disappeared three weeks later. At the western exit of the strait, the conditions discouraged Wallis from waiting in the vicinity.
Wallis was, in effect, set free from the delays that came with waiting for the Swallow but to Carteret, his disappearance bordered on desertion. Still, the combination of the weather conditions and the different sailing qualities of the two vessels probably made the separation inevitable.
While Carteret suspected that he was abandoned, after four months in the Straits, he was disinclined to retrace his route and resolved to press on.
Remarkably, both vessels went on to complete their voyages independently.
Carteret did not clear Cape Pilar until 15 April, four days after his separation from Wallis. Short of water and supplies, he headed for the former buccaneer's lair at Juan Fernandez. He arrived at Mas Afuera, the most westerly in the group, on 9 May and moved on to the main island. When he arrived, he found the Spanish had secretly built a substantial fort on the island.
On that basis, he had little alternative than return to Mas Afuera, where he remained until 25 May. Given the Spanish presence on Juan Fernandez, he investigated the rumoured islands of San Felix and San Ambrose on the basis that they might prove valuable assets in British hands. While he did not manage to locate them, Carteret was the first to suggest that they might coincide with Davis Land.
As he tracked westward across the Pacific, Carteret found it was impossible to steer due west, and some degree of northing was inevitable. Still, he managed to follow a course to the south of previous tracks and south of Wallis. The latter was in the process of making his sole significant discovery at Tahiti.
Carteret's first discovery, on 2 July, was Pitcairn Island, later to become home to the Bounty mutineers. However, it was uninhabited at the time. He encountered what he named the Duke of Gloucester's Islands in the Tuamotus on 11-12 July. One of them was Mururoa, later the site of French nuclear tests. However, it appears on Carteret's charts as Bishop of Osnaburgh Island.
His next encounter, on 12 August, Queen Charlotte's Islands (later the Santa Cruz group) was a rediscovery. The island he named after the Admiralty's First Lord was, in fact, Santa Cruz, visited by Mendaña in 1595. Unsighted in the interim, the island delivered the scurvy-ridden crew a significant problem.
The Swallow's master took an axe to a walnut palm. The local people objected. In a flurry of violence, the master, Alexander Simpson, and three other men received fatal arrow wounds. The deaths were probably due to tetanus rather than poison, but losing the master left only two men aboard the Swallow to look after navigating them to the East Indies.
Carteret pressed on towards Dampier's New Britain. Skirting north of the Solomons, he encountered a cluster of islands off Bougainville's northern tip. He failed to recognise the islands first sighted by Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568.
Arriving at New Britain on 26 August, he discovered a second island, named it New Ireland. He called the strait between the two St George's Channel. The passage between New Ireland and New Hanover became Byron Strait on the charts.
After landing at Gower's Harbour, the Swallow's crew spent a week at English Cove. Although there were native huts, there was no one to object as dozens of palm trees were cut down for their nuts and 'cabbage'-tops. While the crew was desperately weak, they mustered enough strength to careen the vessel and make running repairs before they sailed on 9 September.
Sailing on, Carteret reached Mindanao via the Carolines. The Swallow finally arrived at the Dutch port of Makassar in the Celebes in mid-December. Desperate for supplies and proper facilities to repair his ship, Carteret was greeted with suspicion by the Dutch authorities. Eventually, after a five-month stand-off that nearly ended in violence, he sailed for Batavia.
There was another grudging reception and more delay when he reached Batavia in June 1768. However, the Dutch were more amicable when he arrived at the Cape on 23 November 1768.
A meeting with Bougainville's la Boudeuse, north of Ascension Island, marked the last homeward leg. Both commanders were keen to extract information from the other without disclosing anything of value themselves.
Carteret was back at Spithead, weakened by severe illness, on 20 March 1769, almost a year after Wallis and the Dolphin, largely thanks to the efforts of his Lieutenant, Erasmus Gower. While his captain was indisposed below deck, Gower was the only person aboard the Swallow who could navigate the vessel.
With his health ruined by the voyage and without the patrons who might help him into another command, Carteret received little reward from the Admiralty. His complaints before the Swallow departed ensured that requests for another command fell on deaf ears.
On half-pay, he returned to Jersey in 1770 as seigneur of Trinity, took part in island politics, married, and organised a petition to increase naval half-pay. The latter exercise proved of some benefit to some officers but not to the petitioner.
In the meantime, in 1773, the Admiralty handed his journal to editor John Hawkesworth. It appeared in print as part of An Account of the Voyages undertaken by Byron, Wallis, Carteret and Cook (1773). Like Cook, Hawkesworth's ill-judged editorial changes angered Carteret. When Cook returned from his second voyage, he supervised his journal's publication/ Although Carteret prepared his own version of his journal, it remained on the shelf until a Hakluyt Society edition appeared in 1965.
However, he eventually received another command. The 44-gun fifth-rate HMS Endymion set out in August 1779 on a voyage to the West Indies via West Africa. It was an eventful voyage. After some misadventures in the English Channel and off Senega and a hurricane in the Leeward Islands that nearly accounted for him, Carteret eventually returned home in July 1781. Along the way, he captured the 60-gun French Indiaman La Marquise de la Fayette en flûte (without guns mounted). Despite having a share in taking four prizes, Carteret was paid off, and his ship transferred to another captain, Edward Smith.
Subsequent unsuccessful petitions for a new command increased his bitterness. He suffered a stroke in 1792 and eventually retired to Southampton, where he had lived since 1780, with the nominal rank of Rear-Admiral in 1794 and died at home on 21 July 1796.
Though he died disappointed and embittered, he was unquestionably the victim of ill fortune. His reputation marred because Hawkesworth's mangled version of his journal was the only account of his voyage.
Carteret's inflexibility and a reported tendency to harbour resentments contributed to his subsequent disappearance from the historical radar. His achievements were eclipsed by Cook's triumphant return from his first circumnavigation in 1772, but his geographical contribution was substantial. He shaved off a slice of the area where Terra Australis might lurk, found Pitcairn Island and cleared up geographical relationships to the north of New Guinea. Moreover, he did it all in a vessel that seems to have been barely unseaworthy.
Sources:
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (ed.) The Times Atlas of World Exploration;
Felipe Fernandez Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration;
Elizabeth Baigent, Philip Carteret (1733–1796);
Chambers Biographical Dictionary;
Colin Jack-Hinton The search for the islands of Solomon 1567-1838;
G. A. Mawer Incognita: The Invention and Discovery of Terra Australis;
Michael Pearson, Great Southern Land : the maritime exploration of Terra Australis;
Andrew Sharp, The Discovery of Australia;
O.H.K. Spate The Pacific Since Magellan, Volume III: Paradise Found and Lost;
Wikipedia
Robert Tiley, Australian Navigators: Picking Up Shells and Catching Butterflies in an Age of Revolution;
Glyndwr Williams, Samuel Wallis;
Glyndwr Williams. The expansion of Europe in the eighteenth century, overseas rivalry, discovery and exploitation;
Glyndwr Williams. Buccaneers, explorers and settlers : British enterprise and encounters in the Pacific, 1670-1800;
Rif. Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail 1714-1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates