Beryl Markham and the solo westbound Atlantic crossing that almost killed her in a Vega Gull

Beryl Markham flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west on September 4–5, 1936, covering roughly 3,600 miles in just under 21 hours and 25 minutes in a Percival Vega Gull with a single 200-horsepower engine. She was the first woman to make the westbound crossing solo, fighting headwinds, icing, and instrument-only conditions for nearly the entire flight before crash-landing in a Nova Scotia peat bog when her fuel ran out.

Who Was Beryl Markham Before She Ever Flew?

Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902, but her father moved the family to British East Africa — present-day Kenya — when she was four. Her mother returned to England, leaving Beryl to grow up on a farm at the edge of the Great Rift Valley. She ran with Nandi children, spoke Swahili and Nandi before her English was polished, and learned to hunt with a spear before she learned to read properly. Her father trained racehorses, and Beryl grew up around animals that were fast, dangerous, and beautiful.

By eighteen, she held her own racehorse training license — the first woman in Kenya to earn one. Her horses won. But horses were not enough.

How Did Beryl Markham Become a Pilot?

Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s was an aviation frontier. Bush pilots were opening up East Africa the same way they were opening up Alaska. Beryl began flying with Tom Campbell Black, one of the finest pilots in Africa, and earned her commercial license — the “B license” as it was then called.

She worked as a bush pilot, not for sport but for pay. She scouted elephant herds from the air for hunting safaris, flew mail and supplies into strips carved from the bush, and landed on surfaces that would make a backcountry pilot in Idaho wince. She learned to read the African landscape from the air the way her Nandi friends read it from the ground.

Why Was a Westbound Atlantic Crossing So Dangerous?

By 1936, the Atlantic had been crossed by air several times. Lindbergh flew it eastbound, New York to Paris, in 1927. Amelia Earhart flew it eastbound solo in 1932. But the westbound crossing — from Europe toward North America — was a fundamentally different problem.

The prevailing winds over the North Atlantic blow from west to east. Eastbound crossings benefited from tailwinds. Going westbound meant fighting a headwind the entire way. Ground speed dropped. Fuel burn stayed the same or worsened. Every gallon burned was a gallon unavailable for the miles still ahead, and those miles were effectively longer because the wind was pushing the aircraft backward the entire time.

Several pilots had tried the westbound solo crossing and failed. Some died. Jim Mollison made it in 1932 but crashed on landing in New Brunswick. The ocean had a way of swallowing ambition.

What Airplane Did Beryl Markham Fly Across the Atlantic?

Her aircraft was a Percival Vega Gull, registration VP-KCC, which she called The Messenger. It was a low-wing monoplane powered by a single de Havilland Gipsy Six engine producing about 200 horsepower, with a cruise speed of roughly 150 miles per hour in clean air.

The aircraft was modified with extra fuel tanks fitted into every available space. Fully loaded, it carried enough fuel for approximately 21 hours of range. The crossing, depending on winds, would take 20 to 22 hours. The margin between success and fuel exhaustion was razor-thin — the kind of math that makes a pilot’s palms sweat.

What Happened During the Flight?

On the evening of September 4, 1936, Markham took off from Abingdon, England at approximately 7:00 PM local time. She pointed The Messenger west and climbed into weather that was already deteriorating.

The conditions she faced were brutal by any standard:

No GPS, no weather radar, no reliable autopilot. Her instruments were a compass, a watch, an airspeed indicator, and an altimeter. She had a chart on her knee and numbers worked out on the ground.
Instrument conditions for hours. Thick overcast swallowed the stars and left her flying blind.
Icing with no countermeasures. Ice formed on the wings — no deicing boots, no heated pitot tube she could trust. The ice added weight, deformed the airfoil, and slowly stole lift and airspeed. She climbed to get above it, descended to get below it. The ice kept coming.
No wind verification. She had no way to check her winds aloft, no way to confirm whether headwinds were stronger than forecast or whether she had drifted off course. She held her heading and trusted her numbers.

Somewhere past the halfway point, she crossed the point of no return — the moment when enough fuel has burned that turning back is no longer possible. After that, the only way out was forward.

How Did the Flight End?

Dawn broke over the western Atlantic, and the weather cleared just enough for Markham to see grey ocean below. The engine was still running. Then, after roughly 21 hours airborne, she saw land: Nova Scotia. Cape Breton Island.

But there was no triumphant landing. As she crossed the coastline, the fuel ran out. The Gipsy Six coughed, sputtered, and went silent. She was over a peat bog near Baleine Cove. She put The Messenger down nose-first into the bog. The airplane flipped. She was knocked unconscious.

Fishermen found her hanging upside down in the cockpit, blood running down her face from a gash on her forehead. She was alive. She had completed the first solo westbound Atlantic crossing by a woman.

Why Isn’t Beryl Markham More Famous?

Markham never achieved the household recognition that Amelia Earhart did. Timing and history’s preferences played a role. But in 1942, she published West with the Night, a memoir that is widely regarded as one of the finest pieces of aviation writing ever produced.

Ernest Hemingway, not known for generosity toward other writers, read it and reportedly said he felt ashamed of himself as a writer. The book describes flying over Africa — the silence of the bush at night seen from the air, the way an airplane’s shadow races across the ground like a thing with its own life — and recounts the Atlantic crossing with a clarity that puts readers in the cockpit, smelling engine oil and feeling ice on the wings.

The book went out of print for decades before being rediscovered in the early 1980s, when it became a bestseller again. Pilots who have read it consistently call it the truest flying book they have ever held.

What Happened to Beryl Markham After the Crossing?

After the Atlantic flight, Markham returned to Africa and to training racehorses. She lived a complicated, extraordinary life — married three times, broke more often than flush, uninterested in being easy to know. She died in Kenya in 1986 at the age of 83.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham completed the first solo westbound Atlantic crossing by a woman on September 4–5, 1936, flying roughly 3,600 miles in under 21 hours and 25 minutes.
The westbound crossing was far more dangerous than eastbound due to persistent headwinds that increased fuel burn and extended flight time, leaving almost no margin for error.
Her aircraft, a Percival Vega Gull called The Messenger, carried just enough fuel for roughly 21 hours of flight — barely sufficient for a crossing that could take 22.
She flew most of the crossing in instrument conditions with wing icing, using only a compass, watch, and airspeed indicator — no GPS, radar, or deicing equipment.
Her memoir West with the Night (1942) is considered one of the greatest aviation books ever written, praised by Hemingway and rediscovered as a bestseller in the 1980s.

Primary sources: Beryl Markham, West with the Night (1942); Mary S. Lovell, Straight On Till Morning (1987).