Beryl Markham and the night she flew the Atlantic the wrong way in The Messenger

In September 1936, Beryl Markham became the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the North Atlantic from England to North America — the difficult “wrong way” against the prevailing winds. She flew a turquoise-and-silver Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger, fighting headwinds and a repeatedly failing engine for roughly 3,600 miles before crash-landing in a Nova Scotia bog. She walked away bleeding but alive, having done something no aviator had ever accomplished.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

Long before she touched an airplane, Beryl Markham had already lived several lives. Her father moved the family from England to British East Africa (Kenya) around 1904, and her mother returned to England, leaving young Beryl behind.

She grew up barefoot on a farm at the edge of the Rift Valley, hunting alongside the Murani, the young men of the Nandi people, and learning to throw a spear before she learned to sit in a classroom. As a child she was mauled by a lion — and got back up. That detail tells you most of what you need to know about her character.

She then became the first woman in Kenya to hold a racehorse trainer’s license, and a successful one, training winners while barely out of her teens.

How Did Markham Become a Pilot?

Aviation caught her during the golden age of bush flying in East Africa. A pilot named Tom Campbell Black taught her to fly, and she earned her commercial license quickly.

Her flying work was among the hardest and loneliest in the world. She carried mail and passengers across hundreds of miles of African bush with no usable radio and no real navigation aids — just a compass, a watch, and her own eyes searching for a dirt strip the size of a postage stamp.

She also scouted elephant for safari hunters, flying low over the savanna spotting big bulls, then leading hunters in on the ground. These were hours alone over country where an engine failure meant no rescue — nobody even knew exactly where she was. By 1936, she wasn’t a thrill-seeker. She was a seasoned working pilot.

Why Was the East-to-West Atlantic Crossing So Hard?

In the 1930s, the Atlantic was aviation’s great prize. Charles Lindbergh had flown New York to Paris in 1927, traveling west to east with the wind behind him. Many others followed that eastbound route.

Going the opposite way — England to North America, east to west — was a far deadlier proposition, and it had killed pilots. The reason comes down to one thing every pilot understands: headwinds.

The prevailing North Atlantic winds blow from west to east, so a westbound aircraft fights them the entire way. That means:

• Slower groundspeed and more time aloft
• More fuel burned to cover the same distance
• More fuel weight to carry, making the aircraft heavier and burning still more fuel

Every problem compounded the next — and it all had to be done through brutal weather, in darkness, over water cold enough to make ditching effectively unsurvivable. No one had ever flown solo, nonstop, westbound from England to North America.

The Airplane: A Vega Gull Called The Messenger

Markham’s aircraft was a Percival Vega Gull, a British low-wing monoplane of wood and fabric, powered by a single Gipsy Six engine of about 200 horsepower. It was fast and clean for its day, with good range once loaded with extra tanks.

Hers was painted turquoise and silver and named The Messenger. Crews packed additional fuel tanks into the cabin and wings until the aircraft was loaded to nearly the maximum weight it could lift off the ground.

Her plan: depart Abingdon, England, cross the Atlantic, and land in New York — roughly 3,600 miles, alone, with no copilot and no radio operator. Just a compass, a watch, charts, and fuel cocks she would manage by hand the entire flight.

What Happened During the Flight?

She lifted the overloaded Gull off a wet grass field into foul weather that was only forecast to worsen, and turned west into the dark.

Within an hour or two she was in cloud, rain, and turbulence, flying on instruments by the dim glow of the panel. And remember what 1936 instruments were: a turn-and-bank indicator, an altimeter, an airspeed indicator, and a compass swimming in its bowl. There was no autopilot. She hand-flew the airplane every second of the crossing — no chance to relax her hands or rest.

The cabin had little real heat. The drone of the Gipsy Six engine became her entire world, the sound she monitored with everything she had.

She fought headwinds the whole way, exactly as forecast. The aircraft crept across the ocean slower than planned, and the hours stacked up.

The Engine That Kept Dying

To extend range, Markham ran her fuel tanks dry one at a time, switching to the next by hand. Deep over the black water, she switched to a tank that didn’t feed — a frozen vent or an iced fuel line cut off the flow. The engine coughed, sagged, and quit.

Alone over the North Atlantic, in the dark, the nose dropped toward water that would kill her in minutes. She did what a bush pilot does: she didn’t freeze. She worked the problem, switched tanks, restored fuel flow, and the engine caught again.

But it happened more than once during the crossing. Each time the engine quit, she dropped toward the sea; each time she relit it and climbed back up — never knowing if the next cough would be the last.

How Did the Flight End?

Headwinds had eaten her time and fuel, and the engine trouble had consumed her margins. As gray morning arrived, she crossed the coast of North America not at New York but over Nova Scotia — Cape Breton Island. She had made it across the ocean.

With the fuel finally exhausted, the engine quit for good. She picked what looked from the air like a flat green meadow near a place called Baleine. It was a peat bog — soft and wet. When the wheels touched, they dug in, stopped hard, and the airplane pitched up onto its nose in the muck.

Markham banged her head on the windscreen, climbed out bleeding from the forehead, and walked out of the swamp on foot to find someone and report what she’d done. She had become the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the North Atlantic from England to North America.

She never reached New York, so record purists could quibble. But she had crossed the ocean east to west, alone, through weather and a dying engine that would have ended a lesser pilot many times over.

What About West with the Night?

Years later, Markham wrote a memoir of her life in Africa, the horses, the bush flying, and that night over the Atlantic. She titled it West with the Night — and it stands as one of the most beautiful books any pilot ever wrote.

Ernest Hemingway, not a man given to praise, read it and said she could “write rings around all of us,” that she had written so well he was ashamed of himself as a writer.

The book later fell out of print and was nearly forgotten. Decades on, someone rediscovered Hemingway’s note, tracked the book down, and got it reprinted — introducing a new generation to her flying, her horses, the lion, and the night over the water.

Why Beryl Markham Still Matters

In an era of glass panels, autopilots, and reliable engines, Markham represents what crossing an ocean once demanded: one person, two hands, a compass, and the nerve to keep relighting a dead engine over freezing black water until she either arrived or didn’t.

Anyone who has flown alone at night, even on a simple cross-country, owns a small sliver of what she felt out there — the drone of the engine that becomes your heartbeat, and the quiet knowledge that, in the end, it comes down to your hands, your head, and your nerve.

Key Takeaways

• Beryl Markham made the first solo nonstop flight across the North Atlantic from England to North America in September 1936.
• She flew the “wrong way” — east to west, against prevailing headwinds — a far harder and deadlier route than Lindbergh’s eastbound crossing.
• Her aircraft was a Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger, planned for roughly 3,600 miles from Abingdon, England, to New York.
• Her engine repeatedly quit over the ocean from fuel-feed failures; she restarted it each time and ultimately crash-landed in a peat bog at Baleine, Nova Scotia.
• Before flying, she was a Kenya bush pilot and the first licensed woman racehorse trainer in Kenya, and she later wrote the acclaimed memoir West with the Night.