Beryl Markham, West With the Night, and the First Solo East-to-West Atlantic Crossing That the World Nearly Forgot

Beryl Markham completed the first solo transatlantic flight from east to west on September 4–5, 1936, flying a single-engine Percival Vega Gull from RAF Abingdon in England to a beach in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in 21 hours and 25 minutes. The route - against the prevailing westerlies - was considered the harder Atlantic crossing, yet her achievement received modest recognition and was largely forgotten for decades. Her memoir, West With the Night, published in 1942, remains one of the most celebrated books in aviation literature.

Who Was Beryl Markham?

Markham was born in Leicester, England, in 1902, but grew up far from it. When she was four years old, her father, Charles Clutterbuck, moved the family to British East Africa - the land that is now Kenya - where he farmed and trained horses near a small settlement called Njoro.

Her mother eventually returned to England. Her father let Beryl run wild.

She grew up alongside the Kipsigis people who worked her father’s land, learning to hunt, track, and read landscape the way most children learn to read words. She was mauled by a lion as a child and carried those scars for the rest of her life. She spoke the Kipsigis language before she was fully fluent in English.

From African Bush to the World of Racehorses

When her father went broke and moved to Peru, Beryl - then 18 years old - took over his horse training operation. She became the first woman ever licensed to train racehorses in British East Africa, and she was exceptional at it.

But horses weren’t enough.

In the early 1930s, she began spending time with the small community of aviators based around Nairobi. Tom Campbell Black, a legendary East African bush pilot, taught her to fly. She earned her commercial pilot’s license in 1933 and went to work immediately: supply runs, passenger ferrying, and a role nobody else was filling at the time.

Flying for Elephant Spotters Over the African Bush

Ivory hunters of the era hired pilots to fly ahead of hunting parties and locate elephant herds from altitude. Markham flew these missions, reading the savanna from the air the way she had learned to read it on foot - where the water would collect, where big bulls sheltered in the heat, where the game would move.

She logged thousands of hours over terrain that punished complacency: thunderstorms that built in minutes, mechanical failures hundreds of miles from anywhere, landing strips that were little more than patches of cleared red dirt. By the mid-1930s, she was one of the most experienced and respected pilots working in East Africa.

Why East-to-West Was the Harder Atlantic Crossing

Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927, flying west to east from New York to Paris. Amelia Earhart made the solo west-to-east crossing in 1932. These flights, while historic, had the prevailing westerly winds largely on their side.

The east-to-west route - England to North America - was a different problem entirely. Pilots flew directly into the jet stream. Headwinds could destroy groundspeed. The North Atlantic in September was meteorologically brutal. It was the crossing that remained genuinely formidable well into the mid-1930s.

Beryl Markham decided to try it.

The Flight: September 4, 1936

Her aircraft was a Percival Vega Gull with a de Havilland Gipsy Six engine - a clean British touring plane modified with extra fuel tanks for the crossing. She named it The Messenger.

She departed RAF Abingdon, Oxfordshire, at approximately 8:30 PM local time on September 4, 1936, targeting Floyd Bennett Field in New York - roughly 3,000 miles away.

The early hours were smooth, with a tailwind carrying her out over Ireland before open water. Then the weather closed in: fog, cloud, darkness, headwinds. She flew on instruments over black Atlantic water, navigating by dead reckoning - a chart, a compass, an airspeed indicator, and a clock.

She crossed the point of no return around midnight. The fuel situation no longer allowed turning back.

What Went Wrong Over Nova Scotia

Hours later, somewhere over Nova Scotia, the engine began to falter.

The vent for the nose fuel tank had iced over. Frost was blocking airflow into the tank, creating a vacuum as fuel burned off. The engine was starving - not from an absence of fuel, but from a frozen vent preventing it from flowing.

She was low. It was dark. The coastline was below her in the gloom.

She found a small beach at Baleine Cove, on the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, and put The Messenger down. The ground was soft. The nose went in. The airplane flipped forward. She was thrown against the instrument panel.

When local fishermen found her, she was bleeding from a head wound. She was conscious.

She had been airborne for 21 hours and 25 minutes.

Why History Nearly Forgot Her

The newspapers covered it. She was celebrated in New York and London. But there was no ticker-tape parade - nothing like the 25,000 people who had turned out at Le Bourget for Lindbergh nine years earlier.

Several factors conspired against lasting recognition. Aviation records were falling constantly through the 1930s. The era rarely gave women full credit for this kind of achievement. And the flight ended not at a major airfield with crowds waiting, but nose-down on a remote beach in Cape Breton.

The record was real. The courage was real. The skill was absolutely real.

West With the Night: The Book Hemingway Couldn’t Stop Praising

Markham returned to Africa, resumed horse training, and in 1942 published West With the Night - a memoir covering her African childhood, her years as a bush pilot, and the Atlantic crossing.

Ernest Hemingway, in a private letter to his editor, wrote that she had written “so well, and so marvelously well” that he was “completely ashamed” of himself as a writer. He called it a “really great book.” That is not faint praise from Hemingway.

The book went out of print for decades. It was rediscovered and republished in the 1980s, introducing it to a new generation of readers. For pilots, West With the Night captures something that no textbook does: what it feels like to be alone over dark water with a compass and a fuel gauge, the particular mix of solitude and privilege that every pilot who has flown cross-country at night will recognize immediately.

After the Crossing

Markham returned to Kenya in the 1950s and resumed training racehorses, winning the Kenya Derby four times. The Percival Vega Gull, The Messenger, was repaired after the Baleine Cove crash and flew again.

She died in Nairobi in 1986 at the age of 83.

What Her Crossing Actually Required

Her flight wasn’t a stunt. She wasn’t a record chaser who decided to attempt the Atlantic on a dare. She was a working pilot who had spent years accumulating real judgment in genuinely demanding conditions - African thunderstorms, remote terrain, mechanical trouble with no support nearby.

She applied that accumulated experience to the hardest aerial challenge of 1936.

The records she set have long since been surpassed. The airplane is in a museum. What carries forward is the principle: real skill in the air comes from honest experience, paid attention to over years. Beryl Markham earned that the hard way. It showed on the night that counted.

For further reading: West With the Night by Beryl Markham, and Mary S. Lovell’s biography Straight On Till Morning.

Key Takeaways

Beryl Markham completed the first solo east-to-west Atlantic crossing on September 4–5, 1936, airborne for 21 hours and 25 minutes from Oxfordshire, England to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
The east-to-west route was considered the harder crossing due to sustained headwinds from the prevailing westerlies.
Her aircraft, a modified Percival Vega Gull called The Messenger, nearly failed over Nova Scotia when a frozen fuel vent starved the engine of fuel.
Her memoir West With the Night (1942) drew extraordinary praise from Ernest Hemingway, went out of print, and was rediscovered in the 1980s.
She was the first woman licensed to train racehorses in British East Africa and went on to win the Kenya Derby four times after returning to Kenya in the 1950s.