Was Beryl Markham the first woman to fly across the Atlantic?

She was the first person — male or female — to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic from east to west. Amelia Earhart had crossed west to east solo in 1932, but the eastbound crossing benefits from prevailing tailwinds. Markham's westbound flight against the headwinds was a significantly harder achievement.

What airplane did Beryl Markham fly across the Atlantic?

She flew a **Percival Vega Gull**, a low-wing monoplane powered by a 200-horsepower de Havilland Gipsy Six engine. She named it *The Messenger*. The cabin was largely converted to fuel storage, carrying approximately 255 gallons for the crossing.

Where did Beryl Markham land after crossing the Atlantic?

She crash-landed in a peat bog on **Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia**, after the engine quit when fuel was exhausted. The aircraft nosed over and was badly damaged, but Markham walked away with only a cut on her forehead.

What is *West with the Night* about?

It is Beryl Markham's 1942 memoir covering her childhood in Kenya, her career as a bush pilot and horse trainer in East Africa, and her 1936 Atlantic crossing. Largely ignored upon first publication, it became a bestseller when reissued in 1982 and is now considered a classic of aviation literature.

Why isn't Beryl Markham as famous as Amelia Earhart?

Several factors contributed: Earhart had a far more effective publicity apparatus, and her mysterious 1937 disappearance kept her name in public consciousness indefinitely. Markham returned to Kenya and horse training after her flight, and her memoir didn't find a wide audience until it was republished forty years later.

Beryl Markham and the solo westbound Atlantic crossing that nobody thought a woman could survive

On September 4, 1936, Beryl Markham climbed into a Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger at Abingdon, England, and flew solo across the North Atlantic from east to west — against the prevailing winds, at night, with no radio, no life raft, and no autopilot. Twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes 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 Atlantic crossing. Not the first woman. The first person.

Who Was Beryl Markham Before the Atlantic?

Beryl Markham was born in 1902 in Ashwell, England, but she didn’t stay English for long. Her father, Charles Clutterbuck, a horse trainer, moved the family to British East Africa — modern-day Kenya — when Beryl was four. Her mother returned to England, leaving Beryl to grow up on a farm outside Njoro, in the highlands near the Great Rift Valley.

She grew up barefoot in the African bush, hunting warthog with local Nandi children and learning to speak Swahili and Nandi before she could properly write English. At roughly seven or eight years old, she was mauled by a neighbor’s supposedly tame lion named Paddy — no, the script says Doris. The scars stayed with her for life. The fear did not.

By eighteen, she was a licensed horse trainer — the youngest in Kenya and the first woman. She trained winners and moved among the eccentric aristocrats and adventurers of the Happy Valley set in the Kenyan highlands.

How Did Beryl Markham Learn to Fly?

Horses gave way to airplanes in the early 1930s, when bush pilots were opening up East Africa. Markham’s flight instructor was Tom Campbell Black, one of the finest pilots in Africa. She earned her commercial license and her B license, qualifying her to carry passengers and freight for hire.

She became a bush pilot, flying mail, supplies, and safari clients into strips that were nothing more than clearings hacked out of thornbush — no windsock, no markers, sometimes no real runway. Just a patch of red dirt between the acacia trees.

This was the 1930s. Aviation was barely thirty years old. Instruments were primitive. She flew single-engine biplanes over some of the most unforgiving terrain on the planet — lions and elephants below, thunderstorms building over the highlands every afternoon. She navigated by rivers, railroad tracks, and the shape of the land. No radar. No weather service worth the name.

She could spot a downed pilot or a herd of elephants from the air when nobody else could. The local pilots — all men, all initially skeptical — eventually just accepted it. Beryl could fly.

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

By 1936, the Atlantic had been crossed solo east to west exactly once: by Jim Mollison in 1932. The westbound crossing was the brutal one. The prevailing westerlies that help pilots going west to east fight every mile going the other direction. The flight is longer in time, longer in fuel burn, and the weather over the North Atlantic in September is unforgiving.

Markham’s aircraft, the Percival Vega Gull, was a low-wing monoplane with a 200-horsepower de Havilland Gipsy Six engine. The cabin was mostly fuel tank — extra tanks fitted wherever they could go. Fully loaded, The Messenger carried roughly 255 gallons of fuel and was dangerously heavy for the available runway.

Her survival equipment for a night crossing of the North Atlantic: a compass, an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, a watch, a thermos of coffee, some chicken sandwiches, and a hip flask of brandy. No radio. No life raft. No autopilot. No GPS.

What Happened During the Flight?

Markham took off from Abingdon in late afternoon on September 4, 1936, with a discouraging forecast — headwinds, cloud, rain, and fog over the Canadian coast. She crossed the Irish coast near Galway as darkness fell, and then there was nothing but black ocean below and cloud above and the steady drone of that Gipsy Six.

She navigated by dead reckoning — time, speed, and heading — over featureless ocean in the dark. She flew through rain and cloud. Ice formed on the wings, forcing her to descend to warmer air, burning extra fuel and losing her planned altitude. She watched the fuel level drop through a sight glass on the main tank and did the math in her head.

Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, in the dead of night, the engine coughed. She checked the fuel selector, leaned the mixture, and the engine smoothed out — likely water in the fuel or a momentary vapor lock. For a few seconds, she faced the possibility of ditching in the North Atlantic at night, alone.

The engine kept running.

Dawn came after almost twenty hours of flight. Fuel was critical. She crossed the coast of Nova Scotia to find fog, low cloud, and terrible visibility. Then the engine quit for real. All 255 gallons were gone — burned across roughly 3,600 miles of ocean and headwind.

The Messenger became a glider. Markham picked the best spot she could see and crash-landed in a peat bog on Cape Breton Island. The Vega Gull nosed over in soft ground. The propeller shattered. The landing gear collapsed.

Beryl Markham walked away with a gash on her forehead, soaked in mud and fuel. She was thirty-four years old and weighed about 125 pounds.

Why Was Beryl Markham Forgotten?

She got headlines — for about a week. The New York Times ran the story on the front page. There was a ticker-tape parade. But the world in 1936 was happy to admire a woman aviator for a few days and then move on. Amelia Earhart, a friend of Markham’s, received more lasting attention, partly because Earhart had a better publicity machine and partly because her disappearance in 1937 became a self-perpetuating mystery.

Markham moved to California and wrote West with the Night, published in 1942. It didn’t sell. The war was on, and nobody was buying memoirs about African bush flying. The book went out of print. She returned to Kenya and went back to training racehorses, winning the Kenya Derby six times.

How Did West with the Night Become a Classic?

In 1982, a small California publisher reissued West with the Night. This time, people noticed — helped by the rediscovery of a letter Ernest Hemingway had written to his editor Maxwell Perkins back in 1942: Hemingway wrote that Markham “wrote so well that he felt ashamed of himself as a writer.”

The reissued book became a bestseller. Markham was eighty years old, living in a small cottage near the Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi, training horses, mostly forgotten by the aviation world. Suddenly people were arriving at her door to ask about a flight she’d made forty-six years earlier.

She died in 1986 — fifty years almost to the month after her Atlantic crossing.

One of the most quoted passages from the book captures something every pilot recognizes: you can live a lifetime and never truly be alive for more than a few scattered moments, and those moments — when everything is real and sharp and fully present — happen most often in an airplane.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham completed the first solo east-to-west nonstop Atlantic crossing on September 4, 1936, flying 3,600 miles in 21 hours and 25 minutes against prevailing headwinds.
She flew with no radio, no autopilot, no life raft, and only basic instruments — navigating by dead reckoning over featureless ocean at night.
Before the Atlantic flight, she was already an accomplished bush pilot and the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya.
Her memoir West with the Night (1942) was forgotten for forty years before becoming a bestseller in 1982, praised by Hemingway as writing that put his own to shame.
Her crash-landing in a Cape Breton peat bog — walking away from a fuel-exhausted airplane — remains one of aviation’s great survival stories.