Europeans described the New World through preexisting Western conceptual categories

Evidence

First, Europe brought its own cultural categories, languages, images, and ideas to the New World in order to describe and represent it. It tried to fit the New World into existing conceptual frameworks, classifying it according to its own norms and absorbing it into Western traditions of representation. This is hardly surprising: we often draw on what we already know about the world in order to explain and describe something novel. It was never a simple matter of the West just looking, seeing and describing the New World/the Rest without preconceptions. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 582

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of fitting the unknown into existing frameworks is the operative core of Orientalism’s representational machinery, connecting forward to Said’s ‘the Orient as text.’