Beryl Markham and the solo westbound Atlantic crossing that nobody remembers

Beryl Markham flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west on September 4, 1936, fighting headwinds, icing, and darkness in a single-engine Percival Vega Gull. She was the first woman to complete a solo westbound Atlantic crossing and only the second or third pilot of any gender to survive one. Despite the extraordinary achievement, her name faded from public memory for nearly half a century.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

Markham was born in 1902 in Ashwell, England. When she was four, her father, horse trainer Charles Clutterbuck, moved the family to British East Africa—present-day Kenya. Her mother returned to England, but Beryl stayed, growing up on a farm in the highlands outside Nairobi.

She hunted warthog with local Nandi children, learned to track game before she could read properly, and survived being mauled by a lion as a young girl. By eighteen, she was one of the youngest licensed racehorse trainers in Kenya, winning the Kenya Saint Leger with a horse she had trained herself.

How Did She Learn to Fly?

Bush pilot Tom Campbell Black taught Markham to fly, and she earned her commercial license in 1931—at a time when almost no women flew commercially anywhere in the world. She hauled mail, supplies, and passengers across the Kenyan bush in an Avro Avian. She scouted elephant herds from the air for safari hunters and flew medical supplies to remote settlements.

She flew without radio, without weather reports, navigating by rivers, ridgelines, and the angle of afternoon shadows on the savanna. The African bush gave her an education in airmanship that no flight school could replicate: dead reckoning over trackless terrain, engine-out landings between termite mounds and thorn trees, and an intuitive ability to read the sky.

Why Was the Westbound Atlantic Crossing So Dangerous?

By the mid-1930s, the Atlantic was aviation’s ultimate proving ground. Lindbergh had crossed it eastbound solo in 1927. Amelia Earhart had done the same in 1932. But those were eastbound flights, carried along by prevailing winds.

Westbound was a fundamentally different challenge. The headwinds added hours to the flight—hours that might exceed the fuel supply. Weather systems came head-on. Jim Mollison had barely survived a westbound crossing in 1932, crash-landing in a New Brunswick bog. The westbound route had earned a grim reputation.

Markham decided she wanted it.

What Happened During the Flight?

She found a Percival Vega Gull in England—a low-wing monoplane with wooden construction, fabric covering, and a single de Havilland Gipsy Six engine producing about 200 horsepower. The aircraft was modified with extra fuel tanks carrying roughly 255 gallons of gasoline. She named it The Messenger.

The weather briefing on the evening of September 4 was discouraging: headwinds at every altitude, fog banks over the ocean, probable icing over Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and an Atlantic front that forecasters could not precisely locate. She took off from Abingdon, England, anyway.

The first hours passed in darkness over open water—nothing below but the black Atlantic, nothing ahead but more of the same. She flew by dead reckoning and by the stars when clouds permitted. No autopilot. No GPS. No moving map. Just a compass, an airspeed indicator, and years of hard-won experience.

Mid-Atlantic, the weather found her. Cloud, rain, and turbulence shook the Vega Gull violently. Ice began forming on the wings. In 1936, there was no deicing equipment on an aircraft like this. Ice destroys the airfoil, kills lift, increases drag, and adds weight until the airplane simply cannot fly. She climbed to get above it, descended to get below it, and flew through it when there was nowhere else to go.

After roughly 21 hours in the air, somewhere over Nova Scotia, the Gipsy Six coughed from fuel starvation. She could see land—Cape Breton Island. Then the engine quit entirely.

She put the Vega Gull down in a peat bog near Baleine Cove. The airplane nosed over in the soft ground. She hit her head on the instrument panel, emerging bloodied and dazed but alive. She had not reached New York, her intended destination, but she had crossed the Atlantic Ocean solo, westbound—the hardest way to do it.

Why Did the World Forget Beryl Markham?

Local fishermen found her in flying overalls and a leather helmet, covered in oil and blood, and initially mistook her for a man. For a few days, she was front-page news. The mayor of New York invited her to the city. Then the news cycle moved on.

1936 was a crowded year. The Spanish Civil War had just begun. Edward VIII was about to abdicate the British throne. Landing in a Canadian bog, however heroic, did not carry the same narrative power as touching down at a major airfield.

Markham herself did not fit the expected mold. She was tall, striking, and entirely uninterested in performing gratitude or modesty. She had done what she did because she was a great pilot, she knew it, and she did not pretend otherwise. The world of 1936 was not quite ready for that.

West with the Night: The Book That Hemingway Admired

Markham later moved to California and wrote a memoir called West with the Night, published in 1942. Ernest Hemingway read it and wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins that Markham had written so well it made him ashamed of himself as a writer.

The book sank into obscurity for four decades. In 1983, it was rediscovered and republished, and readers encountered not only the story of the Atlantic crossing but some of the finest aviation prose ever written—passages about flying over Africa at night, the loneliness of engine sound as a sole companion, and stars and scattered ground fires as the only proof the world still exists.

Markham belongs in the small company of pilots who were also genuine literary artists: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ernest Gann, and Beryl Markham.

What Happened After the Flight?

She returned to Kenya and to racehorses. She won the Kenya Derby six times—a champion in two completely separate lives. She died in Nairobi in 1986 at the age of 83.

What distinguishes Markham is the completeness of her achievement. She was not a one-dimensional record-chaser but a bush pilot, horse trainer, writer, and adventurer who happened to be one of the most skilled aviators of her generation. The Atlantic crossing was not a stunt. It was a demonstration of airmanship at the highest level: dead reckoning across an ocean, severe icing with no way to remove it, an engine failure short of the destination, and a pilot who still got the airplane on the ground and walked away.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham completed the first solo westbound Atlantic crossing by a woman on September 4, 1936, flying a modified Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger from England to Nova Scotia.
The westbound crossing was far more dangerous than eastbound flights due to persistent headwinds, head-on weather systems, and greater fuel demands.
She survived icing, turbulence, and engine failure, landing in a Cape Breton Island peat bog after approximately 21 hours of flight.
Her memoir West with the Night (1942) drew praise from Hemingway and is considered one of the great works of aviation literature, though it went unread for 40 years before republication in 1983.
Markham was also a pioneering Kenyan bush pilot and six-time Kenya Derby-winning horse trainer, making her one of aviation history’s most remarkable and underappreciated figures.