Seal of Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal of Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Massachusetts Bay Colony seal was used for the colony's official documents and records. The seal, which depicts an Indian man inviting the English to "Come Over and Help Us," was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the English and the inferiority of the Indian people. The Indian's inferiority is demonstrated by his lack of clothing: He is wearing nothing but a loincloth made of leaves, not unlike the wardrobe Adam and Eve were supposed to have put together after eating the apple, a biblical reference that would not have been lost on a Puritan viewer. He is shown as living in a state of almost unadulterated nature, with no housing or society depicted. There are only a couple of trees, a bow, and an arrow, implying that whatever society the eastern Indians had developed revolved around warfare. The irony of the seal is that, in fact, the English settlers generally had no interest in helping the Indians and the Indians did not want English "help." Of course, the Indians were not in a position to impede the English settlers from achieving their vision of settling America and, as a result, the English helped themselves to the land, usually at the expense of the native tribes.
What does the seal demonstrate regarding the English view of the Indians? How did the viewpoint represented by the seal affect colonization in the Americas? What were the English expecting to find when they traveled to America, and in what ways were those expectations not met?