The Adventures of Jonathan Carver

      Jonathan Carver was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on April 13, 1710, the son of a prosperous gentleman. The family later moved to Canterbury, Connecticut, and at the age of 36, having received the best education available, Carver married Abigail Robbins and embarked in the shoemaker’s trade. In 1755, with the outbreak of the French and Indian War, he joined the colonial militia. He worked his way up through the ranks, becoming a captain in 1761. Two years later he left the army. He taught himself map-making and surveying as he was determined “to explore the most unknown parts” of the “vast acquisition of territory” that Britain had gained from the war (Parker 14). He believed — accurately as it turned out — that the Mississippi would one day be the main path of commerce, and “will enable their inhabitants (of the central lands) to establish an intercourse with foreign climes, equally as well as the Euphrates, the Nile, the Danube, or the Volga do those people who dwell on their banks … ” (Severin 185).

      Fulfilling Carver’s desire to survey the area around the Mississippi was an uphill battle, however. Coastal settlers viewed the upper Mississippi as “a nasty, inhospitable area, plagued with mosquitoes in summer, bitterly cold in winter, swarming with treacherous Indians, and more suited to French half-breeds than worthy New Englanders,” (Severin 185-6). Still, there were some pioneer leaders who did have an interest in the area. One of these was Major Robert Rogers, who agreed to hire Carver in 1766 to explore west of Michilimackinac. Rogers did not have the authority to put Carver on the payroll, but gave him a commission with the hopes that the Crown would reimburse Carver with the expenses at his return.

      Carver was expected to document geography, the number and location of Indians, and to describe the trading posts that they encountered along the river as an inventory of resources available to the French. He hoped to determine how much of the Mississippi might be commercially viable (Severin 187), but he was also searching for a river to the West. Though Carver’s plans may have been a bit grandiose for a man of his position and skill, he remained devoted to the idea of the journey. Severin describes him as “an inquisitive amateur with a lively curiosity and a high spirit of adventure, the sort who was normally dismissed by his acquaintances as a harmless crank,” (Severin 188).

      He left with some traders and Indians in September 1766, taking the old French route of Joliet and Marquette through Lake Michigan, Green Bay, and the Fox River. The party stopped at numerous Indian villages, where Carver sought to make friends with the Indians, and diligently recorded everything he heard and saw, including the tall tales they told him to try to satisfy his curiosity. But the more he traveled, the more disappointed he became at how similar the tribes all seemed to be. He was running out of exotic details to record, and even the landscape was at best indifferent. Accordingly he decided to press further west, leaving the bulk of the company at a trading post and pressing on with a French voyageur and an Iroquois canoeman (Severin 191).

      Once on the Mississippi, they were following the route taken by Hennepin while he was a prisoner of the Sioux, and in fact, Carver hoped to see the tribe for himself after reading Hennepin’s account of his captivity. When they reached Lake Pepin, Carver declared that it was “the most proper head of the Mississippi” because the interruption the lake causes in the flow of the river made the character of the upper stream seem vastly different to him. Carver’s hopes of winning the Sioux’s allegiance to the British Empire led him to turn up the Minnesota river just below the Falls of St. Anthony so that he could visit their main encampments.

      In April 1767 he left for the Falls of St. Anthony where Rogers had promised to leave supplies for him with which to further his relationship with the Native Americans. But Rogers had not kept his word, and Carver was forced to abandon his project, unable to proceed further west without gifts for his Indian hosts. Many of his expenses had been used to alert the Indians of the West that Michilimackinac was favorably disposed to them and their trade; without gifts to make a good impression, he was unable to continue (Parker 18). Disappointed, he traveled back to Michilimackinac by way of Lake Superior.

      There he attempted to raise interest in a book about his travels, but failing this resolved to leave his wife and family once again and sail for London. Arriving in 1769 with all his notes, he planned to publish a narrative of his travels and to press claims for compensation for his services. But he immediately fell into financial difficulties, as he waited for the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations to answer his petition for reimbursement.

      He tried to persuade the British government to carry out further western expeditions, but the growing threat of revolution in the colonies occupied all the attention of the politicians. He developed numerous other schemes, all with an aim of allowing him to satisfy his desire to travel once more, and all failed. Possibly because of his financial difficulties, he entered into a bigamous marriage. Finally, he returned to his original idea of publishing his accounts.

      The first edition of his Travels through the Interior Parts of North America in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768 appeared in 1778. Sadly, the largely truthful account had been doctored by his editor with colorful tales and copied passages from other authors (Severin 197-8). It may be that Carver agreed to these changes out of desperation, but though the book quickly became a bestseller, going through at least 32 editions, Carver saw none of the profits and died in 1780, probably of malnutrition (Severin 200).

      By 1789 praise for the book had faded and many were questioning the validity of Carver’s claims, some asserting that the entire story was a hoax, and that Carver had never seen the Sioux at all. He was not only accused of plagiarism, but of being “an ignorant shoemaker incapable of writing such a book on his own” (Parker 1). The controversy about Carver’s book persisted until the original journals documenting his explorations were discovered at the British Museum in the early 1900s. The journals helped prove that Carver’s editor was the one responsible for the book’s inaccuracies and plagiarism. While the validity of his land claim has never been fully resolved to the satisfaction of his descendants, Carver’s published work has been exonerated by most historians. And despite the controversy, the book remained a prominent force, influencing the poets Schiller and Byron, and possibly encouraging Thomas Jefferson to send Lewis and Clark on their transcontinental journey. Though not the legacy he had hoped for, still Carver’s work was able in its way to enlarge people’s thinking about the still largely unknown continent of North America, and it is further honored in the name of a Minnesota county as well as several geographical features in the areas which he explored.

— Ann K.D. Myers

Sources

Carver, Jonathan, 1710-1780. Reize door de binnenlanden van Noord-Amerika / door Jonathan Carver … ; naar den derden druk uit het Engelsch vertaald door J.D. Pasteur … Te Leyden : bij. A. en J. Honkoop, 1796.