Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, all travel reportage about the lands north and west of the Great Lakes was beholden either to the British Admiralty or to the large fur companies, in particular the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Vast distances, severe climate, and sparse population ruled out anything like independent travel or travel for its own sake. The naval expeditions of James Cook and George Vancouver charted the Pacific coast of North America during the later eighteenth century. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the British navy undertook to survey the Arctic coastline, beginning with the land expeditions of Captain John Franklin. The design and reporting of these expeditions reflected what Mary Louise Pratt has referred to as the post-Enlightenment “knowledge-building project of natural history.” Informed by a “planetary” sense of the knowledge-gathering errand, the ship-based scientific expedition “became one of Europe’s proudest and most conspicuous instruments of expansion.” Expeditions such as those of Cook and Vancouver included scientific specialists, and their elegant and prestigious published accounts were imitated by aspiring travelers-turned-writers, as the genre became one of the most popular and profitable of British publishing. Lacking anything like the support of a group of naval vessels, the fur traders who were almost solely responsible for communicating knowledge of the interior of the continent nonetheless aspired to publish “voyages” that shared some of this prestige and glamor. For most of the fur trade travelers, however, writing was initially a response to the record-keeping requirements of the large commercial organizations in which they labored.