Colonial report narratives steered political conclusions via their cultural framing.

Evidence

These storied reports were fashioned cultural accounts with political effects that precluded some conclusions and encouraged others. … Communications that depended on flooded roads, forest bramble, tired horses, slow river rafts, small boats, great ships, and sparse telegraph connections produced a colonizing world that moved and responded with an uneven and ever varying pace. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1279