- Philip Carteret
:"This is about the British explorer; for the colonial governor, see
Philip Carteret (governor) ."
Philip Carteret,
Seigneur of Trinity (January 22 ,1733 ,Trinity Manor ,Jersey –July 21 ,1796 ,Southampton ) was a British naval officer and explorer who participated in theRoyal Navy 'scircumnavigation expedition of 1766.In 1766 he was made a captain and given the command of the "Swallow" to circumnavigate the world, as consort to the HMS|Dolphin|1751|2 under the command of
Samuel Wallis . The two ships were parted shortly after sailing through theStrait of Magellan , Carteret discoveringPitcairn Island and theCarteret Islands , which were subsequently named after him. In 1767, he also discovered a new archipelago insideSaint George's Channel betweenNew Ireland andNew Britain Islands (Papua New Guinea ) and named itDuke of York Islands [Encyclopædia Britannica , vol. 4, p.263: "Duke of York Islands ". Chicago, 1989. ISBN 0-85229-493-X.] , as well as rediscovered theSolomon Islands first sighted by theSpaniard Álvaro de Mendaña in 1568 [Encyclopædia Britannica , vol. 25, p.254: "Pacific Islands ". Chicago, 1989. ISBN 0-85229-493-X.] . He arrived back in England, atSpithead , on20 March 1769.The following year he returned to Jersey as seigneur of Trinity and took part in Jersey politics. However, he 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 abaronetcy from his maternal uncle SirJohn Silvester
*a daughter, Elizabeth Mary (1774 - 21 Sep 1851, Yarmouth), in 1818 became the third wife ofWilliam Symonds ,Surveyor of the Navy .Carteret's health was ruined by his voyage of exploration, and (unlike
John Byron and the crew of Byron's ship HMS|Dolphin|1751|6, which had carried out a circumnavigation via theFalkland Islands between 1764 and 1766 on which Carteret had served aslieutenant ) 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, he published an account of the voyage as part of "An Account of the Voyages undertaken by Byron, Wallis, Carteret and Cook", but that volume's editorJohn Hawkesworth made changes to his account and so Carteret produced a version of his own (which, however, only got published in 1965, by theHakluyt Society .His new ship, the 44 gun HMS|Endymion|1779|6, at last came on
1 August 1779 and despite problems in the Channel, offSenegal and off theLeeward Islands (at the last of which Carteret was nearly killed in a hurricane) he arrived in theWest Indies as instructed. Despite having a share in 4prize ship s, he was paid off and the "Endymion" transferred to another captain. All his petitions for a new ship were unsuccessful and he suffered astroke in 1792, retiring toSouthampton in 1794 with the rank ofrear-admiral . He died there two years later and was buried in the catacombs of All Saints' Church, Southampton.References
External links
* [http://www.decarteret.org.uk/database/ps01/ps01_412.htm decarteret.org.uk Person Sheet]
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