Juan Bautista Munoz, Historia del Nuevo-mundo (Madrid, 1793)

A royal cosmographer was ordered in 1779 to write the history of America and given a cedula opening every archive in the kingdom to him. The prologue he printed fourteen years later is the report of what he found: indices that listed almost nothing from the early years, papers thrown away as worm-eaten, and at Simancas a heap of originals nobody had read. It also states, in a sentence worth the whole volume, that the crown gave him the commission and no instructions.