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. ORLEANS---- _The World’s Insomnia Champion Lived Here_ The late Joseph C. Lincoln of Chatham gained national fame with his stories of Cape Cod. The quaint characters he wrote about were, for the most part, taken from life. Some other old-timers, however, have been a bit too unconventional, even for Mr. Lincoln’s yarn-spinning purposes. “Bill-Ike” Small, for example. Bill-Ike--or, Isaac Wilbur Small, a name that no one would have recognized--claimed he never slept. He was the insomnia champion of the world until he passed on in Orleans a few years ago. And, he made it so real a Boston paper printed pages about him. The paper sent down its crack feature writer and he and Bill-Ike went off to New York to tour the night clubs--the idea being to determine whether Bill-Ike’s story would stand the test during two or three night of skylarking and sitting up in a hotel room. Bill-Ike made good, we were told, for the newspaperman observed him every blessed minute of the sleeplessness, nor did he, himself, fall off a chair. HE GAINED WEIGHT, TOO “I close my eyes for a little while, just to rest ’em, but I don’t sleep. I haven’t used a bed for over five years,” Bill-Ike would tell me. Then the gentle old man with a flowing white beard would add that he had gained 38 pounds in the past year.