Reading a Contact Document for Its Assumptions

The idea

A contact document carries its writer's assumptions in ordinary words, and three habits bring them out. First, notice the words of possession, because taking possession, claiming and granting assume that the land was available to be claimed, and that assumption is the document's argument rather than its background. Second, notice how the inhabitants are described, since counting them as souls to be saved, hands to be used or obstacles to be removed tells you what the writer intends. Third, notice what the writer finds worth recording about the landscape, because a list of harbours, timber and mines is a commercial inventory whatever else the passage claims to be. The exam asks what such a passage reveals about its writer, and these three are where the revealing happens.