Beryl Markham and the solo westbound Atlantic crossing that history tried to forget

On September 4, 1936, a pilot named Beryl Markham took off from Abingdon, England, in a silver-and-blue Percival Vega Gull and flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west — the hard direction, into the prevailing winds. She landed 21 hours and 25 minutes later in a peat bog on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, becoming the first person to complete the crossing solo in that direction. Then, for reasons that say more about the era than the achievement, the world forgot her.

Who Was Beryl Markham Before She Flew?

Markham’s life before aviation was already extraordinary. Her family moved from England to Kenya when she was four. Her mother left; her father raised her on a horse farm in the East African highlands. She grew up barefoot among Nandi children, learning to track animals and read terrain the way a pilot reads weather.

By her teens she was training racehorses. By eighteen, she became the first woman in Africa licensed as a horse trainer, winning races across East Africa.

How Did She Become a Pilot?

Markham learned to fly in the late 1920s under bush pilot Tom Campbell Black. Bush flying in colonial East Africa meant no paved strips, no weather stations, no navigation aids — just single-engine biplanes over terrain filled with lions, crocodiles, and forests dense enough to swallow a wreck without a trace.

She earned her commercial pilot’s license, making her one of the first women in the world to hold one. She flew mail, delivered supplies, and scouted elephant herds at treetop level over the Serengeti for big-game hunters — solo, in a biplane, where one engine failure meant no second chances.

Why Is East-to-West the Harder Atlantic Crossing?

By 1936, the Atlantic had been crossed before. Charles Lindbergh flew west to east in 1927. Amelia Earhart did it solo, also west to east, in 1932. But those flights had the prevailing winds and the jet stream at their backs.

Flying east to west meant fighting headwinds the entire way. Those headwinds could add hours to a flight — hours a pilot didn’t have fuel for. No one had crossed the Atlantic solo from east to west. Not Lindbergh. Not Earhart. Not anyone.

What Was the Airplane?

The Percival Vega Gull, registration G-ADPR, which Markham named The Messenger, was a low-wing monoplane with wooden construction and fabric covering. Its single de Havilland Gipsy Six engine produced roughly 200 horsepower, with a cruising speed of about 150 miles per hour.

It was not designed to cross oceans. Engineers modified it with extra fuel tanks crammed into every available space, giving it barely enough range — assuming favorable winds. The tanks were so large they blocked most of the pilot’s forward visibility.

The cockpit had no autopilot and no functional radio. Markham’s instruments consisted of a compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator, and a watch.

What Happened During the Flight?

Markham took off around 7:00 p.m. local time, planning to fly through the night, cross the Atlantic at dawn, and reach New York by afternoon. The weather forecast, such as it was in 1936, offered little certainty.

She flew north along the great circle route, arcing over Iceland toward Newfoundland. As night fell, conditions deteriorated. The unpressurized, unheated cockpit dropped well below freezing at altitude over the North Atlantic. Her hands went numb. Ice began forming on the wings.

Ice on a fabric-covered airplane with a fixed-pitch propeller and carburetor can be fatal. Markham felt the aircraft growing heavy and sluggish, the engine coughing as ice choked the air intake. She descended to find warmer air but encountered fog and rain so thick she couldn’t see her wingtips. For hours she climbed and descended, fighting the controls with frozen hands — climbing to escape rain, dropping to escape ice.

Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, her main fuel tank began draining faster than calculated. A leak, a gauge error, or stronger-than-forecast headwinds — she had no way to know which.

The Engine Quit

After nearly twenty hours, approaching Newfoundland in thick fog, the engine coughed — the unmistakable sound of fuel starvation. The main tank was dry. She switched to the reserve, and the engine caught, but the math was clear: New York was out of reach.

She descended blind through fog over what she hoped was land. Breaking through the overcast, she saw brown peat bog below — no runway, no town. The engine quit for good. She put the Vega Gull down in the bog near Baleine Cove, Cape Breton Island. The soft ground caught the wheels and the airplane nosed over, coming to rest inverted in the mud.

Markham hung upside down in her harness, bleeding from a forehead cut, alive. Two local fishermen found her walking away from the wreck. Her first question was reportedly to ask where she was. When they told her Cape Breton, she knew she’d done it.

Why Did the World Forget Her?

Briefly, Markham was front-page news. New York gave her a ticker-tape parade. She was celebrated alongside Lindbergh and Earhart as one of aviation’s great transatlantic pioneers.

Then she disappeared from public memory. The reasons were partly historical — by 1939, the world was at war, and long-distance aviation records were eclipsed by Spitfires and Messerschmitts. But the reasons were also personal. Markham was a complicated woman in an era with little tolerance for complicated women. She’d had affairs, left marriages, and refused to conform to the image of a demure aviatrix. Earhart was easier for the press to canonize. Markham was too uncontrollable.

She returned to Kenya after the war, went back to training racehorses, and lived quietly for decades.

West with the Night: The Book Hemingway Envied

In 1942, Markham published a memoir called West with the Night, a lyrical account of her childhood in Africa and her flying career. Ernest Hemingway read it and wrote to his editor that she had written so well he felt ashamed of himself as a writer. Coming from Hemingway, that is an almost unprecedented compliment.

The book went out of print and was forgotten along with its author.

In 1982, a publisher rediscovered and reissued it. Markham was still alive, living in Nairobi, in her eighties. The book became a bestseller, and the world finally asked how it had never heard of this woman who had accomplished what Lindbergh and Earhart had done — arguably something harder — and written about it with the skill of a poet.

Beryl Markham died in 1986 at the age of eighty-three, just four years after the world found her again.

Key Takeaways

• Beryl Markham completed the first solo east-to-west transatlantic flight on September 4, 1936, covering the crossing in 21 hours and 25 minutes in a modified Percival Vega Gull.
• The east-to-west crossing was significantly harder than west-to-east due to prevailing headwinds — a feat neither Lindbergh nor Earhart had attempted solo.
• She flew with minimal instruments — no autopilot, no reliable radio, no GPS — navigating by dead reckoning and stars through ice, fog, and fuel starvation.
• Her memoir, West with the Night (1942), drew praise from Hemingway but went out of print for forty years before being rediscovered in 1982.
• Markham’s erasure from aviation history reflects the era’s discomfort with women who defied convention, not any deficiency in her accomplishment.