Carteret was the son of Charles de Carteret, Seigneur of Trinity, and his wife Frances-Mary S. Paul. Carteret entered the navy in 1747, serving aboard the , and then under Captain
John Byron from 1751 to 1755. Between 1757 and 1758 he was in the on the
Mediterranean Station. As a lieutenant in the he accompanied Byron during his voyage of circumnavigation, from June 1764 to May 1766. In 1766 he was made a
commander and given the command of
HMS Swallow to circumnavigate the world, as consort to the under the command of
Samuel Wallis. The two ships were parted shortly after sailing through the
Strait of Magellan, Carteret discovering
Pitcairn Island and the
Carteret Islands, which were subsequently named after him. In 1767, he also discovered a new archipelago inside
Saint George's Channel (Papua New Guinea) between
New Ireland and
New Britain Islands (
Papua New Guinea) and named it
Duke of York Islands, as well as rediscovered the
Solomon Islands first sighted by the
Spaniard Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568, and the
Juan Fernández Islands first discovered by
Juan Fernández in 1574. Weakened by severe illness, he arrived back in England, at
Spithead, on 20 March 1769, having been ably assisted by Lieutenant
Erasmus Gower who was, for much of the voyage, the only fit person on board
Swallow who could navigate. The following year he returned to Jersey as seigneur of Trinity and took part in
Jersey politics. He was promoted to
post-captain in 1771 and was in London on 5 May 1772, when he married Mary Rachel Silvester (1741–1815), a doctor's daughter. Four of their five children survived to adulthood, including: • the second son,
Philip Carteret Silvester (1777–1828), entered the navy like his father and inherited a
baronetcy from his maternal uncle
Sir John Silvester • a daughter, Elizabeth Mary (1774 – 21 September 1851,
Yarmouth), in 1818 became the third wife of
William Symonds,
Surveyor of the Navy. Carteret's health was ruined by his voyage of exploration, and he received little reward from the Admiralty. He did not have the patrons which were necessary for naval promotion at this time, and this and his complaints before the voyage on the
Swallow's ill-suitedness to the voyage ensured that his requests for a new ship in 1769 fell on deaf ears. Put on
half-pay, the petition for increasing half-pay which he got together helped many officers, but not Carteret himself. In the meantime, in 1773, his journals of the voyage were published as part of
An Account of the Voyages undertaken by Byron, Wallis, Carteret and Cook, but that volume's editor
John Hawkesworth made many changes to his account and so Carteret drafted a correct version of his own (which, however, only got published in 1965, by the
Hakluyt Society). His new ship,
HMS Endymion, at last came on 1 August 1779 and despite problems in the
Channel, off
Senegal and off the
Leeward Islands (at the last of which Carteret was nearly killed in a hurricane) he arrived in the
West Indies as instructed. Despite having a share in four
prize ships, he was paid off and the
Endymion transferred to another captain. All his petitions for a new ship were unsuccessful and he had a stroke in 1792, retiring to
Southampton in 1794 with the rank of
rear admiral. He died there two years later and was buried in the catacombs of
All Saints' Church, Southampton. In 1940 the church was destroyed by German bombing. In 1944 the bodies beneath it were reburied in
Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton. ==See also==