Beryl Markham, The Messenger, and the Night She Flew the Atlantic the Hard Way From East to West in Nineteen Thirty-Six

On the evening of September 4, 1936, Beryl Markham took off from England and flew alone through the night into a headwind no one had ever beaten, becoming the first person to fly solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic from England to North America - east to west, the hard way. She crash-landed in a Nova Scotia bog roughly 21 hours later, having navigated the entire ocean in darkness by dead reckoning while her engine repeatedly cut out. Decades later she wrote West with the Night, a memoir so good that Ernest Hemingway said she could “write rings” around him.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

To understand the flight, you have to understand the woman - and that means starting in Africa.

Markham was born in England in 1902, but her father moved her to British East Africa - modern-day Kenya - when she was a small child. She grew up half-wild on the edge of the Rift Valley, learning to hunt with local Murani warriors and speaking their language before she was fluent in drawing-room English. As a girl she was chased up a tree by a lion and lived to laugh about it.

Her first career had nothing to do with airplanes. She became a racehorse trainer - one of the first women in the colony to hold a license, and a skilled one. That work taught her to read something that couldn’t talk back, to sense when an animal was about to do something dangerous. It’s the same instinct that keeps a pilot alive: you feel for the thing that isn’t right yet.

How Did Markham Learn to Fly?

In her late twenties, Markham met a bush pilot named Tom Campbell Black, and the horses gave way to airplanes.

She learned in the open-cockpit biplanes of the era - Avro Avians and Gipsy Moths - wood-and-fabric machines whose four-cylinder engines made less power than a modern lawn tractor. She didn’t fly them on lazy Sunday afternoons over paved fields. She flew them across Kenya and the Serengeti, becoming a working commercial pilot in a country with no airports, no navigation aids, and no weather service.

Markham carried mail, passengers, and supplies to mining camps and safari outfits. She also became famous across Africa as a spotter for big-game hunters, flying low and slow for hours over the bush to find elephant herds and direct hunters on the ground. She once flew a nighttime emergency medical run to reach a man dying of a burst appendix, navigating by dead reckoning and the memorized shape of the hills.

That was her flight school. Africa, as the saying goes, does not give makeup exams.

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

By the mid-1930s, aviation was obsessed with records - fastest, farthest, and first. The Atlantic had already been crossed: Alcock and Brown flew it nonstop in 1919, and Charles Lindbergh flew it solo in 1927.

But every famous crossing went the same direction: west to east. New York to Paris. Newfoundland to Ireland. There was a reason. In the North Atlantic, the prevailing westerlies blow west to east, so those pilots had a tailwind pushing them along, adding ground speed and stretching their fuel.

No one had ever flown solo and nonstop from England to North America - east to west, into the wind. That direction is brutal. A headwind cuts your ground speed, which lengthens the flight, which means carrying more fuel, which means more weight, a harder takeoff, and less ability to climb over weather. It’s a vicious circle that had already killed pilots who tried and were never seen again. That unclaimed prize is exactly what Markham set out to take.

What Aircraft Did Beryl Markham Fly Across the Atlantic?

Markham flew a Percival Vega Gull, a sleek British low-wing monoplane of wood construction with an enclosed cabin and a single Gipsy Six engine producing around 200 horsepower. It was painted deep turquoise blue with silver trim and named The Messenger.

To make the crossing, crews stripped the graceful four-seat tourer down and packed it with extra fuel tanks, turning it into a flying gas tank capable of staying aloft for roughly 24 hours. She would need most of that.

Her navigation equipment was almost nonexistent: a compass, a clock, and an airspeed indicator. She would cross the entire ocean by dead reckoning - holding a heading and airspeed, timing it by watch, doing the arithmetic in her head, and trusting the math against an unseen wind over a thousand-plus miles of featureless, dark water. There was no radio worth the name, no autopilot, and no way to get a position fix.

What Happened on the Night of the Flight?

Markham took off from Abingdon, England, on the evening of September 4, 1936, deliberately timing it so she’d cross the worst of the water in darkness and reach North America in daylight.

The airplane was so heavy with fuel it could barely stagger into the air. Rain was already falling and the forecast was bad. Her friends watched The Messenger claw off the runway, sink toward the trees, and slowly climb into a gray sky before it disappeared.

Out over the ocean, the weather closed in - rain, then heavy rain, then a solid wall of storm cloud. With no radar and no way to see what was coming, she flew straight through it because the fuel allowed no detours. Ice built up, the airplane hammered in the turbulence, and the headwind she’d expected leaned on her hour after hour, eating fuel faster than the miles passed. She flew the entire night alone in the roar of the engine, the smell of gasoline, and the red glow of the instruments, with nothing outside but black.

How Did She Survive the Engine Failures?

Hours into the night, over the middle of the ocean, the engine quit.

The cause: she’d run an extra tank dry - normal and expected - but a tank vent had iced over or clogged, so when she switched tanks the fuel wouldn’t feed properly. She glided in total darkness with the altimeter unwinding, reached down to switch tanks, and waited through the longest seconds of her life. The engine coughed, caught, and roared back.

Then it happened again. And she fixed it again - reportedly more than once across the crossing, each time a cold, methodical repeat of the same emergency, alone, in the dark, over the sea. Every one of those moments was a chance to end up in the ocean. She kept the airplane flying instead, which is the whole job: when everything goes wrong, you fly the airplane and do the next thing until you see land.

Where Did Beryl Markham Land?

Dawn came up gray after more than 20 hours in the air. She was cold, exhausted, and dangerously low on fuel - but her dead reckoning had held. Land appeared on the horizon: Nova Scotia, specifically Cape Breton Island.

She’d hoped to reach New York, but the fuel was nearly gone and the engine was starving. She set up to land on what looked like a green pasture near a place called Baleine. It wasn’t a pasture - it was a peat bog. The soft ground grabbed the wheels the instant they touched, and The Messenger dug in and pitched onto its nose in the muck. Markham struck her head on the windscreen and cut her forehead.

Then she climbed out of that blue airplane standing on its nose in a Canadian bog, having become the first person to fly solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic from England to North America - east to west, into the wind. She didn’t quite reach New York, and small-minded critics tried to hold that against her, but she had crossed the ocean alone. It counted then, and it counts now.

What Is West with the Night?

In 1942, Markham wrote a memoir of her life in Africa and the air called West with the Night, named for the direction of her crossing. It is one of the most beautiful books ever written about flying.

The book sold modestly, then went out of print and was forgotten for roughly 40 years - until someone found a letter in which Ernest Hemingway, who rarely praised other writers, said Markham could write rings around all of them and called himself a mere carpenter with words beside her. That letter got the book republished in the 1980s, where it became a bestseller and introduced her to a new generation. She outflew the men across the Atlantic, then outwrote them about it.

Markham eventually returned to Africa and to training racehorses, winning more races. She lived to 83 and died in Kenya in 1986, on the same edge of the Rift Valley where she’d grown up wild.

Why Markham’s Story Still Matters to Pilots

What sticks with pilots isn’t the record - records get broken. It’s the how. A woman alone in a wooden airplane, in a storm, over the ocean, in the dark, with the engine quitting again and again, and every single time reaching down, switching the tank, and simply flying the airplane. That’s the entire trade distilled into one long, terrible night: when it all falls apart, you fly the airplane, you do the next thing, and then the next, until you see land.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham was the first person to fly solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic from England to North America (east to west), departing September 4, 1936.
She flew a fuel-laden Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger, powered by a ~200 hp Gipsy Six engine, navigating over 20 hours by dead reckoning with only a compass, clock, and airspeed indicator.
Her engine cut out repeatedly over the ocean due to an iced or clogged tank vent; she restarted it each time by switching tanks in total darkness.
She crash-landed in a peat bog near Baleine, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, after failing to reach New York - but the crossing still counted.
Her 1942 memoir West with the Night was rediscovered in the 1980s after praise from Ernest Hemingway and became a bestseller; Markham died in Kenya in 1986 at age 83.