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The first of these hypotheses, which, as I previously mentioned, has become part of the historical tradition of the manuscript, can be first found in Samuel Purchas’s encyclopedia of exploration, Hakluytus Posthumus: Or Purchas, His Pilgrimes, published in 1625. In it, Purchas (1625, 1065–66) presented the manuscript in the following way:

Reader, I here present unto thee the choicest of my Jewels. …Such an one we here present, a present thought fit for him whom the senders esteemed the greatest of Princes, and yet now presented to thy hands before it could arrive in his presence. For the Spanish Governour having with some difficultie (as the Spanish preface imports) obtained the Booke of the Indians with Mexican interpretations of the Pictures (but ten daies before the departre of the Ships) committed to the same to one skillful in the Mexican language to be interpreted … this Historie thus written, sent to Charles the fifth Emperour, was together with the Shippe that carried it taken by Frenchmen of war, from whom Andrew Thevet, the French King’s Geographer, obtained the same: after whose death Master Hakluyt (then Chaplaine to the English Embassadour in France) bought the same for 20 French crownes.11