Any examination of the ‘official’ ideological landscape of early modern Spain, and of the language in which that ideology was couched, must embrace the principal linguistic challenge encountered by Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic during the sixteenth century: that of reporting, interpreting and classifying the European encounter with the New World. Few events in history can have put such strain on pre-existing narrative strategies as were placed on the linguistic resources taken by the conquistadores to America in and after 1492. Generations of eye-witnesses struggled to bridge the gaps between what they saw, what they understood and what they could communicate. Some, like Columbus, brought their accounts back with them, so at least could vouch for them in person. Others, like Cortés, had to achieve similar feats of communication entirely at a distance, conjuring vivid images of the unimaginable in reports that were not brought back, but sent back in their absence.

The scale of the challenge faced by the Spanish writers about the New World is underlined in Anthony Pagden's study European Encounters with the New World, and particularly in his second chapter, ‘The Autoptic Imagination’. As Pagden makes clear, the key challenge for the chroniclers of the New World was to establish their narrative authority. The discovery and its associated literature cut across the traditional view that knowledge depended on textual interpretation and exegesis: ‘all that could be known had to be made compatible with what had once been said by a recognized canon of sacred and ancient authors’ (Pagden, p. 12). But for the most part there was, by definition, no place for the New World in the ancient canon, and the men who went there and wrote back were having to create texts where none existed before (p. 54). For many of these eye-witnesses, the first-person narrative was the cornerstone of their claim to authenticity.

The challenge facing a man like Cortés – a man of action, but one constrained by the general requirement of the Crown that he should account, in writing, for his actions at all times – was not in fact unique to America and the sixteenth century.