Beryl Markham, The Messenger, and the Nineteen Thirty-Six Solo Flight the Wrong Way Across the Atlantic

On September 4, 1936, British-raised aviator Beryl Markham became the first person to fly solo and nonstop from England to North America - the harder, westbound crossing, flown directly into the prevailing headwinds. She flew a single-engine wooden monoplane named The Messenger for roughly 21 hours, survived repeated engine failures over the open ocean, and crash-landed in a peat bog on Cape Breton Island. Her achievement stands apart precisely because of its direction: she flew the way no one had survived before.

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

Most people remember the transatlantic pioneers but never ask which way they flew - and direction is the entire point.

Charles Lindbergh made his famous solo crossing in 1927, flying west to east from New York to Paris. What often goes unmentioned is that he had the wind at his back. The prevailing winds over the North Atlantic blow from west to east, effectively pushing an America-to-Europe flight along.

Reverse the route, and that same wind becomes a wall. Flying from Europe to North America means fighting a headwind the entire way: slower groundspeed, more hours aloft, and more fuel burned to cover the same distance. It is, mile for mile, the meaner direction.

By 1936, no one had ever flown it solo and nonstop from England to North America. Several men had died trying.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

Beryl Markham was not what 1930s newspapers expected a record-breaking aviator to be.

She was born in England in 1902 but raised in British East Africa (Kenya). She grew up on a farm, hunting alongside the local Nandi children, running with them and learning their language. In every way that mattered, she was a child of Africa.

Before she ever flew, she made her name training racehorses, becoming one of the first licensed female horse trainers in Kenya - and a highly regarded one. She had an instinct for fast-moving living things that didn’t want to be told what to do.

She came to aviation in her late twenties and learned to fly in the African bush. This was no weekend hobby. She flew mail, carried passengers, and scouted elephant herds from the air for big-game safari outfits, radioing animal positions to hunters below.

She flew an open-cockpit airplane over jungle, desert, and mountains, alone, with no reliable radio navigation and no dependable weather service, in an era when engines quit without warning. By the time she took on the Atlantic, she was a hardened professional who had already buried friends and learned the bush pilot’s iron rule: the airplane doesn’t care how you feel - fly it or die.

The Airplane: The Messenger

The aircraft was a Percival Vega Gull, a low-wing British monoplane built of wood.

Normally a four-seater, its cabin was stripped out and packed with fuel tanks for the crossing. Markham named it The Messenger and had it painted deep blue with silver trim.

Power came from a single de Havilland Gipsy Six engine of about 200 horsepower. That one engine had to haul the airplane and all its fuel across roughly 2,000 miles of open ocean, into the wind, with no backup and no realistic hope of rescue if it failed over the mid-Atlantic in September.

The flight was financed by John Carberry, a wealthy and unpleasant figure from her Kenya circle. As she prepared to depart, he reportedly offered a chilling send-off - wondering aloud which ocean she would drown in.

The Takeoff from Abingdon

Markham departed from Abingdon, an airfield west of London, on September 4, 1936.

The weather was terrible: rain, low cloud, and a strong west wind that had been blowing for days - the very wind she’d have to fight. Everyone urged her to wait.

But with autumn closing in and conditions only set to worsen, she made the call every pilot understands. The weather was never going to be good, so she went.

The Messenger was so heavy with fuel that takeoff was an act of faith. The airplane lumbered down the wet grass at full throttle and clawed into the air with the runway running out beneath it. Then she was over the water - alone, heading into the dark and the wind.

What Flying Solo Really Meant in 1936

The word “solo” understates what she actually faced.

There was no autopilot. She hand-flew the airplane for more than twenty hours straight. There was no ground controller, no radar, no moving map. Her entire toolkit was a compass, airspeed indicator, altimeter, clock, and chart.

She navigated by dead reckoning - heading, speed, and time. Hold the heading, trust the math, and hope the wind behaved as predicted.

Over open ocean at night, in cloud, there was nothing to see: no horizon, no lights, no stars. Just the dim glow of the instruments and the black. That’s the condition pilots call spatial disorientation, when the inner ear starts lying and up becomes indistinguishable from down. She flew through hours of it.

The cold was brutal. The unheated wooden cabin offered no protection from the bone-deep chill of the North Atlantic in September at altitude, at night. Cramped among the fuel tanks, surrounded by the smell of gasoline and oil, she endured the engine’s roar until it stopped registering as sound and became a pressure inside her skull.

The Engine That Kept Dying

The turning point of the flight came from the fuel system.

The Messenger drew from several tanks in sequence - run one low, then switch a valve (a petcock) to a fresh tank. As she neared the far side of the ocean, closer to Canada than England, one tank ran dry on schedule. She reached to switch tanks, and the engine died.

A fuel tank vent had iced over in the extreme cold. With the vent frozen shut, fuel couldn’t feed, and the engine went silent over open water. In its place came the sound no ocean pilot ever wants to hear: only the wind past a dead propeller.

She didn’t panic. She worked the problem - coaxing the frozen system until the Gipsy Six caught and roared back to life. Then she climbed away.

And then it happened again. And again. The iced vent kept starving the engine through the closing hours of the flight, forcing her to nurse it back to life each time with numb fingers over the cold gray water.

The Crash Landing at Baleine Cove, Nova Scotia

She crossed the coast of North America - but New York was out of reach.

With the engine starving and fuel and altitude running out over the fog-shrouded coast of Nova Scotia, she had beaten the ocean but still had to get the wheels down alive.

She descended through the murk over Cape Breton Island at a place called Baleine Cove. What looked like solid ground was a peat bog - soft, wet, and grabbing. The wheels dug in, and the little blue airplane flipped onto its nose, tail in the air, engine buried in the muck.

Markham crawled out bleeding from a cut on her head, muddy, and cold - but alive.

She had done it: roughly 21 hours in the air, the first person to fly solo and nonstop from England to North America, into the wind, in a wooden single-engine airplane with no radio navigation and a fuel system that had nearly killed her repeatedly.

Local fishermen ran across the bog to pull her free - men who’d never heard her name. She’d aimed for a triumphant New York arrival with crowds and cameras and instead landed knee-deep in a Canadian bog. But that changed nothing about the ocean she’d crossed.

West with the Night: The Book That Outlived the Record

Markham did something most record-chasers never managed - she wrote it all down.

Her memoir, West with the Night, is regarded as one of the finest books ever written about flying. Ernest Hemingway, famously stingy with praise, wrote to a friend that she wrote so well he felt like “a carpenter with words” beside her, calling it a “bloody wonderful book.”

What makes the book endure isn’t the record - it’s the flying itself: the nights over the African bush, the feel of an airplane in the hands, the loneliness and joy of a life lived alone in the air. She wrote it from inside the cockpit, because that’s where she had lived it. The memoir remains in print today.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham became the first person to fly solo and nonstop from England to North America on September 4, 1936 - the difficult east-to-west crossing, flown into the prevailing headwinds.
She flew a wooden Percival Vega Gull named The Messenger, powered by a single ~200-horsepower de Havilland Gipsy Six engine, across roughly 2,000 miles of open ocean.
An iced-over fuel tank vent repeatedly cut the engine over the Atlantic; she restarted it each time and pressed on for about 21 hours.
She crash-landed in a peat bog at Baleine Cove, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, walking away injured but alive.
Her memoir, West with the Night, earned lavish praise from Ernest Hemingway and endures as a classic of aviation literature.