The reception of the ‘discovery’, conquest and colonisation of Spanish America spawned a rich imaginative literature, in which prosaic blow-by-blow accounts of particular campaigns by chroniclers of the Indies and official ‘press releases’ were mixed with the fanciful reports of real and imaginary travellers, both of Iberian and northern European origin. More than this, however, from the first words of Columbus the supposedly factual reporting of the ‘new’ would stretch beyond the bounds of tolerance even the imagination of Europeans familiar with illustrations and representations from the sort of imaginative Early Modern bestiary to be seen in the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch and his contemporaries, or bred on myths of unparalleled wealth, the travels of Marco Polo, and novels of chivalry whose authors’ imagination rendered plausible seemingly impossible events. Each would find their complement, if not their rival in marvel and monstrosity, within the environment of the New World. Foremost among the ‘new’ novelists of the late twentieth century, Gabriel García Márquez has often exploited the sometimes unfathomable dilemma of those interpreters of Spanish America baffled by its seemingly boundless reality. As a writer, he comments that ‘mi problema más importante era destruir la línea de demarcación que separa lo que parece real de lo que parece fantástico, porque en el mundo que trataba de evocar, esa barrera no existía’. Although in his case it is deliberate rather than accidental, it is hardly surprising that he should add, ‘no hay autores menos creíbles y al mismo tiempo apegados a la realidad que los cronistas de Indias, porque el problema con que tuvieron que luchar era el de hacer creíble una realidad que iba más lejos que la imaginación’.

Making sense of the literature and its transmission – whether geographical and historical treatises, tall tales, travellers’ journals, or surviving ephemera representing both the intellectual world and its more shadowy literary ‘underworld’ – is a complex question. In part it represents one indication of the multiple ways in which the Americas fructified the European imagination(s), the intellectual counterpart of the manifold transfer of flora, fauna and epidemiology known generically as the ‘Columbian Exchange’. This transfer of ideas and knowledge systems was also reciprocal, and abiding, in that conquest of the New World inaugurated a contest for cultural space that is still working itself out.