Chatham is named for the County of Kent town in old England. Before the
Pilgrims came to the Cape, Champlain, the French explorer, arrived
here in 1606. He planned to establish a French colony in Chatham, but
a fight with the Indians drove him off. In 1658, William Nickerson of
Norfolk, England, appeared on the scene and gave the sachem Mattaquason
a shallop for the sea-girted acres. Complications developed; Nickerson
was called to Plymouth Court and ultimately he had to pay 90 pounds as
a fair purchase price. In 1712 Chatham was incorporated as a town.
The Mayflower, her passengers looking to a settlement below the Hudson,
barely escaped being wrecked on the Chatham shoals. Here she turned
back to enter Provincetown Harbor.
Three hundred years later a Navy flier repaid this visit, wafting down
from the heavens onto Plymouth, England.
Lieut. Albert Cushing Read of Hanson, Mass., was the first man to
fly the Atlantic, and he took off from Chatham. He competed in a
trans-ocean contest of the Navy “Nancies” in 1919, the N-C’s 1, 2, 3
and 4. The original takeoff point was Rockaway Beach, Long Island. Read
rode the N-C 4, which was disabled far off this shore, but managed
to get into this port, where, as luck had it, a Navy air station was
located for the training of large numbers of fliers for the last war.
A new motor was installed, the N-C 4 winged off to the Azores via
Trepassey Bay, New Foundland and the pioneering flight was completed
with fifty-two and a half hours having been spent in the skies. Read
flew on to Plymouth, perhaps for sentiment’s sake, having the Mayflower
in mind.