How can I create a self-contained html report with rmarkdown?

Assuming that the file shown in the question is in the current directory and called caro.Rmd and the *.jpg files are all present at the appropriate location and you are able to run pandoc then this works for me:

library(knitr)
library(rmarkdown)

render("caro.Rmd", html_document(pandoc_args = "--self-contained"))
browseURL("caro.html")