Beryl Markham and West with the Night - The Solo Crossing Nobody Believed She Could Make

Beryl Markham completed the first solo east-to-west transatlantic flight on September 5, 1936, flying a single-engine Percival Vega Gull from England to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in 21 hours and 25 minutes - against the prevailing winds, at night, alone. She then sat down and wrote West with the Night, a memoir that Ernest Hemingway privately called so well-written that it left him “completely ashamed of myself as a writer.” Most pilots have never read either account.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

Born in England in 1902, Markham moved to British East Africa at age four when her father relocated to the Kenyan highlands near Nakuru. She grew up running with Nandi tribespeople and learning to hunt wild boar with a spear. At eleven years old, she survived a mauling by a neighbor’s pet lioness - and was, by all accounts, more annoyed than frightened.

Africa gave her something no classroom could: the ability to read landscape, move through uncertainty, and trust instinct over equipment. Those skills would prove critical over the Atlantic three decades later.

How She Learned to Fly

Markham began flight training in the early 1930s, partly under Tom Campbell Black, one of East Africa’s most accomplished racing pilots. By 1933 she held her commercial pilot’s license - among the first women on the African continent to earn one.

She put it to work immediately. Her job was aerial elephant scouting: flying at low altitude over the East African bush to locate herds and radio their positions to hunting parties on the ground. The work was unforgiving - no useful charts, improvised landing strips that were “probably” clear of rocks, and morning thermals that punished inattention. If the engine quit, there were no options.

Those thousands of hours built something that cannot be taught. Markham learned to listen to her powerplant the way a cardiologist listens to a heartbeat. Any change in note, any hesitation, any roughness got her full and immediate attention. She would need those ears later.

Why the East-to-West Crossing Was So Much Harder

By 1936, transatlantic crossings were the moon shots of their era. Charles Lindbergh had flown New York to Paris in 1927, becoming the most famous man in the world. Amelia Earhart had crossed solo in 1932. The Atlantic had become a competitive arena.

But east-to-west - Britain to North America - remained effectively unsolved. The prevailing North Atlantic winds blow west to east. Lindbergh had them at his back. Flying into them meant lower groundspeed, higher fuel burn, and a dangerously narrow margin at the crossing’s end, when the tanks are running low and the pilot is too tired to be making critical decisions. Multiple pilots had attempted east-to-west solo crossings before 1936. Most turned back. Some went into the water and were never found.

The Aircraft: Percival Vega Gull “The Messenger”

Markham’s sponsor, Kenyan sportsman John Carberry, helped select and fund the aircraft: a Percival Vega Gull, a British-built low-wing monoplane that normally seated four passengers in comfort. For the crossing, all passenger seating was removed and additional fuel tanks were installed throughout the airframe - in the nose, in the wings, wherever the structure would permit. The modification shifted the center of gravity forward enough to noticeably change the handling characteristics.

The aircraft was renamed The Messenger.

Markham practiced with the modified airplane, studied North Atlantic September weather patterns, and chose her departure window carefully.

The Crossing: September 4–5, 1936

She departed RAF Abingdon in Oxfordshire at 9:04 p.m. on September 4, 1936. She was 34 years old.

She climbed into cloud almost immediately. England disappeared. There was no moon. She climbed to four thousand feet, then five, then six, threading through overcast in total darkness. The instrument panel of a Percival Vega Gull would fit on a card table with room to spare: airspeed indicator, altimeter, compass, engine gauges, fuel gauges, turn and bank indicator. That was her world. No weather radar. No autopilot. No satellite phone. No way to call anyone if something went wrong.

If the engine quit over the Atlantic, she was going into the water.

Long overwater crossings in the dark impose a specific kind of danger that isn’t fear - it’s monotony. The ocean looks the same at midnight as it does at two in the morning. The engine drone becomes hypnotic. Pilots have fallen asleep over the Atlantic and never made landfall. Markham cracked the ventilation panel to force cold ocean air into the cockpit and kept her focus locked on the compass needle. Nothing else.

Fourteen hours in. Sixteen. She encountered heavy cloud and ice forming on the leading edges over the western Atlantic. The Vega Gull had no de-icing equipment. She descended to find warmer air and hand-flew through cloud by instrument and instinct - the same way she had flown rough air over the Kenyan highlands for years.

The Gipsy Six engine kept running.

Cape Breton Island: The End of the Crossing

The coast of Nova Scotia appeared in the grey flat light of an early September morning. She had crossed the North Atlantic - the first person to do so solo, east to west, without a navigator or support aircraft.

Then the engine faltered.

Fuel system trouble - water contaminating the last tank, or vapor lock as the fuel ran critically low, depending on the source - caused the Gipsy Six to lose power. She was over land, over Cape Breton Island, but there was no runway beneath her. Rock, peat bog, and spruce forest in the early morning light.

She found the least bad patch of ground and put The Messenger down. The nose hit soft peat. The tail came up. The airplane flipped inverted.

Twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes after leaving England.

She unbuckled herself from an upside-down airplane in a Cape Breton peat bog at dawn, climbed out through what had been the windshield, and stood up. A cut on her forehead. Some bruises. She walked to a nearby farmhouse. When a fisherman finally understood where this woman had flown from, overnight, alone, he reportedly stood and stared at her for a long moment without speaking.

West with the Night: The Book Hemingway Couldn’t Put Down

Markham published West with the Night in 1942. In the middle of the Second World War, a memoir by a woman about flying in Africa and crossing the Atlantic found little audience. The book went quietly out of print.

Ernest Hemingway had read it. In a private letter to his editor written shortly after publication - discovered and published much later - he described Markham’s writing with characteristic precision: she had written so well, so marvelously well, that he was “completely ashamed of myself as a writer.”

The book was reprinted in 1983, forty-one years after first publication, and found the audience it had always deserved.

Why This Matters for Pilots Today

Markham doesn’t have a major airport named after her. She doesn’t appear in the first chapter of most aviation history texts. No commemorative stamps.

But she crossed the same ocean as Lindbergh. Into the wind. At night. Alone. With instruments you could list in a single sentence.

Her story is more than historical record - it’s a case study in what accumulated hours actually build. The engine awareness that kept her alive over the Atlantic was developed over thousands of hours of bush flying in Africa, landing on strips that were “probably” clear of rocks. The instrument flying she executed through icing and cloud over the western Atlantic was a direct extension of that same skill set, built over terrain where engine failure left no alternatives.

She was not lucky. She was prepared in ways that didn’t show up in any logbook.

Beryl Markham died in Nairobi on August 3, 1986, at age 83. She had outlived Tom Campbell Black, killed in a mid-air collision at a British airshow just weeks after her Atlantic crossing. She had outlived her era, and nearly everyone who ever doubted her - which was, by all accounts, a substantial number of people.

West with the Night is in print. It belongs next to your logbooks.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham completed the first solo east-to-west transatlantic flight on September 5, 1936, flying from RAF Abingdon, England to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in 21 hours and 25 minutes
The east-to-west route was dramatically harder than Lindbergh’s westbound crossing because it flew directly against the prevailing North Atlantic winds, producing higher fuel burn and lower groundspeed
Her aircraft, the Percival Vega Gull “The Messenger”, was stripped of passenger seating and packed with auxiliary fuel tanks; she carried no de-icing equipment, autopilot, or radio communication capability
The instrument skill and engine awareness she used to survive the crossing were built over thousands of hours of demanding, uncharted bush flying in East Africa - not in a simulator or formal training program
Her memoir West with the Night (published 1942, reprinted 1983) prompted a private letter from Hemingway calling her prose so accomplished that he was left “completely ashamed of myself as a writer”