The original English settlers, it would appear, displayed little imagination in naming the new settlements and natural features [Pg287] of the land that they came to. Their almost invariable tendency, at the start, was to make use of names familiar at home, or to invent banal compounds. /Plymouth Rock/ at the North and /Jamestown/ at the South are examples of their poverty of fancy; they filled the narrow tract along the coast with new /Bostons/, /Cambridges/, /Bristols/ and /Londons/, and often used the adjective as a prefix. But this was only in the days of beginning. Once they had begun to move back from the coast and to come into contact with the aborigines and with the widely dispersed settlers of other races, they encountered rivers, mountains, lakes and even towns that bore far more engaging names, and these, after some resistance, they perforce adopted. The native names of such rivers as the /James/, the /York/ and the /Charles/ succumbed, but those of the /Potomac/, the /Patapsco/, the /Merrimack/ and the /Penobscot/ survived, and they were gradually reinforced as the country was penetrated. Most of these Indian names, in getting upon the early maps, suffered somewhat severe simplifications. /Potowánmeac/ was reduced to /Potomack/ and then to /Potomac/; /Unéaukara/ became /Niagara/; /Reckawackes/, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, was turned into /Rockaway/, and /Pentapang/ into /Port Tobacco/.[38] But, despite such elisions and transformations, the charm of thousands of them remained, and today they are responsible for much of the characteristic color of American geographical nomenclature. Such names as /Tallahassee/, /Susquehanna/, /Mississippi/, /Allegheny/, /Chicago/, /Kennebec/, /Patuxent/ and /Arkansas/ give a barbaric brilliancy to the American map. Only the map of Australia, with its mellifluous Maori names, can match it.