He was foreman of Regent's Park of the Royal Botanic Society from 1851 to 1857.
[3] In 1857, he joined an expedition to Niger led by William Balfour Baikie (1825–1864), a naturalist and philologist from Scotland, who was in correspondence with Charles Darwin.
The expedition ended prematurely when the ship hit rocks near Jebba.
It took one year for the survivors to be rescued and taken back to England but Charles Barter never returned to his country.
He caught dysentery and died in Rabba, Nigeria in 1859.