Beryl Markham and the night she flew west with the wind against her

On September 4, 1936, Beryl Markham took off from Abingdon, England, in a single-engine Percival Vega Gull and flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west — against the prevailing winds, at night, with no radio. Roughly 20 hours later, she crash-landed in a peat bog on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, becoming the first person to complete a solo nonstop east-to-west transatlantic crossing. Not the first woman. The first person.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 but grew up in Kenya on her father’s horse farm. She ran barefoot through the bush with Nandi warriors and was mauled by a neighbor’s lion as a girl — and got up and kept going. By her teenage years, she could train racehorses better than most adults.

She learned to fly in the late 1920s from Tom Campbell Black, a legendary bush pilot in East Africa. She didn’t learn for recreation. She became a commercial pilot — one of the first women in Africa to hold a commercial license — flying mail, supplies, and passengers across Kenya, Tanganyika, and into the Sudan. No navaids. No paved runways. Dirt strips carved out of the savanna where a giraffe might wander across the departure path. She navigated by rivers and the shape of the land below.

Why Was Flying East to West So Dangerous?

By the mid-1930s, the Atlantic had been crossed multiple times. Lindbergh flew it in 1927. Amelia Earhart crossed in 1932. But every solo crossing had gone west to east — New York or Newfoundland to Europe — with the prevailing westerlies providing a tailwind. Physics was on your side.

East to west was a different problem entirely. Flying into the headwinds meant lower ground speed with the same fuel burn. The math got ugly fast. Several pilots had attempted it. Some turned back. Some went missing. Jim Mollison made it from Ireland to New Brunswick in 1932, but he crash-landed and wrecked his airplane.

Beryl Markham decided she would do it solo.

The Airplane: Percival Vega Gull “The Messenger”

She secured backing from a wealthy friend and acquired a Percival Vega Gull, a sleek low-wing monoplane powered by a 200-horsepower de Havilland Gipsy Six engine. Painted blue and silver, the airplane was named The Messenger.

Extra fuel tanks were fitted in the wings and cabin, which meant the cockpit reeked of petrol for the entire flight. One spark and the airplane would have become a fireball. She carried roughly enough fuel for 21 hours of flight. The crossing was estimated to take 20 to 22 hours depending on headwinds. The margins were razor thin.

What Happened During the Flight?

Markham took off from Abingdon in the late afternoon of September 4, 1936, flying northwest toward the Atlantic into gathering dusk. She crossed over Ireland as the last light faded, then headed out over open ocean.

No GPS. No weather radar. No radio contact with anyone. Just a compass, a watch, an airspeed indicator, and the steady drone of the Gipsy Six turning over in the dark.

Ice began forming on the wings. She had no deicing equipment. She climbed and descended through the night, searching for altitudes where ice wouldn’t form or where it might melt. Hour after hour — boring and terrifying in equal measure, a combination only pilots truly understand.

The headwinds were stronger than forecast. The fuel calculations grew tighter with every passing hour.

The Landing at Baleine Cove

As dawn broke on September 5, Markham was somewhere over Nova Scotia. She’d been airborne for roughly 20 hours. The main fuel tank was nearly dry. She switched to reserve.

Then the engine coughed. It sputtered, caught again, and cut out entirely. The sudden silence after 20 continuous hours of engine noise must have been deafening.

At low altitude over Cape Breton Island, she set up a glide and put the Vega Gull down in a peat bog at Baleine Cove. The airplane nosed over in the soft ground. She hit her head on the instrument panel. The propeller bent. The landing gear was damaged.

But she was alive. And she had made history.

Why Isn’t Beryl Markham More Famous?

Markham should be a name every student pilot learns alongside Lindbergh, Earhart, and Doolittle. Instead, she was largely forgotten for decades. The Second World War consumed public attention. She returned to Kenya and went back to training racehorses. Her memoir, West with the Night, went out of print.

It wasn’t until 1982, when Markham was 80 years old, that the book was rediscovered. Ernest Hemingway had praised it decades earlier, writing in a letter to his editor that she had written so well that he felt ashamed of himself as a writer. Hemingway — ashamed — because of how Beryl Markham described flying.

When republished, West with the Night became a bestseller. The world remembered this extraordinary woman who had grown up wild in Africa, trained racehorses, become a bush pilot, and flown the Atlantic backward, into the wind, in the dark, alone — and lived to write about it with more grace and clarity than nearly anyone who ever sat in a cockpit.

The Writing That Captured Flight Itself

West with the Night stands as one of the finest pieces of aviation writing ever published. Markham described the loneliness of that crossing — the way darkness plays tricks on a pilot, the way you start talking to the engine like a living thing because your life depends on its heartbeat.

She wrote of the experience: being irrevocably alone in an airplane, with nothing to observe but instruments and your own hands in the semi-darkness, concentrating all sensation of living into a single moment. That is a pilot writing, not a poet — someone who understood what it meant to be alone with the machine and the sky.

Beryl Markham died in Kenya in 1986, almost 50 years to the day after her transatlantic flight. She was 83 years old.

Key Takeaways

• Beryl Markham completed the first solo nonstop east-to-west transatlantic flight on September 4-5, 1936, flying from Abingdon, England, to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
• She flew a Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger with roughly 21 hours of fuel for a 20-22 hour crossing — against prevailing headwinds, at night, with no radio or deicing equipment.
• Before the Atlantic crossing, she was already a pioneering bush pilot in East Africa and one of the first women on the continent to hold a commercial pilot’s license.
• Her memoir, West with the Night, was praised by Ernest Hemingway and is widely regarded as one of the greatest aviation books ever written.
• Despite achieving what no one else had done, Markham was largely forgotten until her book was republished in 1982 and became a bestseller.