Jonathan Carver

author

Jonathan Carver

1710–1780

An early American explorer and writer, he is best remembered for vivid accounts of his travels through the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi regions in the 1760s. His bestselling travel book helped shape how British and European readers imagined the North American interior.

2 Audiobooks

Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768

Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768

by Jonathan Carver

A treatise on the culture of the tobacco plant with the manner in which it is usually cured

A treatise on the culture of the tobacco plant with the manner in which it is usually cured

by Jonathan Carver

About the author

Jonathan Carver was an American colonial soldier, explorer, and author active in the eighteenth century. He served in the French and Indian War, then traveled widely in 1766–1768 through parts of what are now the Upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region, recording geography, trade, and encounters with Indigenous nations.

He became known for Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, a book published in London in 1778. It drew strong interest from readers curious about lands beyond the British colonies and became one of the best-known early English-language travel narratives about the interior of North America.

Some details of Carver's life remain uncertain, including the exact year of his birth, which is often given differently in historical sources. Even so, his writing left a lasting mark on how eighteenth-century readers understood the continent's interior and its possibilities for trade, empire, and settlement.