Samuel Hearne, in his 1770 journal, resolves critical ideological, social, political, and economic "disruptions" by mapping culture onto geography. Hearne reconciles certain apparently incommensurable "disruptions of his cultural knowledge" by means of what Daniel Clayton calls "the physical and rhetorical demarcation of distance and difference between Europeans and Natives." The HBC's Prince of Wales's Fort functions as the symbolic, if absent, centre of Hearne's text, and the text's crucial symbolic classifications depend fundamentally on a shifting spatial value called "distance from the Fort."
