In the ensuing year, 1758, a battalion of light infantry, commanded by Colonel Oliver Partridge, was raised in the province of Massachusets Bay, by order of Governor Pownall, for the purpose of invading Canada, in which our author served as second lieutenant of Captain Hawks’s company; and in 1760 he was advanced to be captain of a company in Colonel Whetcomb’s regiment of foot, during the administration of Governor Hutchinson. In Governor Barnard’s time, in 1762, Captain Carver commanded a company of foot in Colonel Saltonstall’s regiment.
I have not been able to collect any anecdotes of our author, during his military services; but from the written recommendations in my hands, of persons high in office, under whom he acted, he appears to have acquitted himself with great reputation, and much to the satisfaction of his superior officers. These recommendations are not confined to military conduct merely; they uniformly introduce him as a person of piety, and of a good moral character. Throughout the narrative of his travels, indeed, an animated regard to the duties of religion is evidently prevalent, which must procure a credibility to the facts he mentions, that might otherwise be suspended. If authors, who have visited countries unknown to their contemporaries, had always been actuated by a sacred regard to truth and moral rectitude, history in general would have been developed with just and convincing relations, and not left involved in doubt and obscurity.
This firm integrity and undaunted courage appeared evident upon every interesting occasion: they were, indeed, essentially requisite to conduct him through the most dangerous enterprizes with a perseverance that is more generally the offspring of true fortitude, than of daring boldness or impetuosity of imagination.
With so many favourable requisites for success and advancement, descended from parents respectable for their military and civil dignity, as well as for their fortune; endued with courage, sagacity, and a spirit of enterprize, rarely united in one individual, it might be an object of enquiry, why Captain Carver, whose conduct was so excellent, in a moral as well as in a military view, should never have been promoted above the command of a company.
It is a truth confirmed by history, that true fortitude is the genuine offspring of an humble mind. Whatever we acquire by industry and labour, we are apt highly to estimate; it is a kind of new creation of our own; and a persuasion of this, inspires ambition, and even a forward ardour for distinction; and what a partial imagination magnifies to ourselves, we naturally magnify to others, and gradually acquire a consequence, and reap rewards adequate, if not superior, to desert: but the naturally brave is naturally modest; what is innate, does not present itself to the imagination as its own; it neither begets vanity, nor excites ambition; and thus great endowments, which might have been cherished, and turned to the most important advantages, are frequently neglected, and lost to society. Whatever natural or acquired excellencies were possessed by Captain Carver, not only seemed unnoticed by himself, but were accompanied by a diffidence, which in some instances was extraordinary indeed; and the reader must be convinced of this, when he is informed, that Captain Carver died, through want, with three commissions in his pocket.
The year after his commission under Colonel Saltonstall was signed, the peace of Versailles took place, namely, anno 1763, when our author, having discharged his military obligations to his country, retired from the army. But his natural turn for enterprize, and the pursuit of novelty, did not suffer him to enjoy a life of useless ease; he began to consider, to use his own sentiments (having rendered his country some services during the war) how he might continue still serviceable, and contribute, as much as lay in his power, to make that vast acquisition of territory, gained by Great Britain in North America, advantageous to it; and here he commences his own biographer, continuing his relation in the following history of his travels, till his visit to England in the year 1769.
Though I have not been able to procure many additional anecdotes of this ingenious traveller, yet a respect to his memory, and a sense of his services to the nation at large, excited a desire to bring together a few outlines of his character, and probably at some future period, when the present unhappy contest between this kingdom and the American colonies shall have subsided, particulars of more importance than I have been able to meet with, may be procured from that part of the world, which he has taken so much useful labour to describe.
This barrenness of materials is, however, in some degree compensated by the important relations he has communicated in the succeeding pages, which not only regard himself, but likewise a part of the great American continent, hitherto almost unknown to the inhabitants of Europe, and even to those of the cultivated parts of the same continent.
In his descriptions of these vast regions, he seems to have embraced every opportunity of pointing out the advantages which might be derived in a commercial view, from a just knowledge of them, and of the policy of the various tribes who possess them. In his picturesque view of the scenery round Lake Pepin, his imagination, animated as it was by the magnitude, the novelty, and grandeur of the objects, is not so far transported, as to interrupt the most scrupulous attention to the situation, as improveable for commercial and national advantages.
In the midst of a new and rich creation, he suggested the probability of rendering this lake, and its variegated environs, the center of immense traffick, with a people whose names and tribes were scarcely known to the commercial parts of either side of the British empire, but whose dispositions and pursuits seemed calculated to promote and secure this interesting and national benefit.