Valorous accompanying Admiral Sir George Strong Nares's Arctic expedition to Disko Island, and spent the summer sounding and dredging in Davis Strait and the North Atlantic.

After the 1872–1876 HMS Challenger expedition had returned, he was asked in January 1878 by Sir Wyville Thomson to describe the free-swimming Crinoids that had been collected.

[6] Carpenter published a large number of papers on Echinoderm and especially Crinoid morphology, in the Royal, Linnean, Geological, and Zoological Societies of London, the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Zoologischer Anzeiger, and many other journals.

He also contributed an account of the Echinoderms to Cassell's Natural History (1883), and was the chief contributor for the section on the same group in Nicholson and Lydekker's A Manual of Palaeontology (1889).

[2] Carpenter died at Eton College where he was Science Master in 1891 after self-administrating chloroform during a bout of temporary insanity caused by chronic insomnia.