On the evening of 4 September 1936, a turquoise-and-silver monoplane lifted off from an airfield in Oxfordshire and turned out over the Atlantic, into the dark and into the wind. At the controls, alone, was a 33-year-old woman who had never flown the ocean before. Ahead of her lay some 3,600 miles of black water and a headwind that had defeated better-funded men.

Her name was Beryl Markham, and she was about to become the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west — the hard way.

Raised wild in Kenya

She was born Beryl Clutterbuck in England in 1902, but she was made in Africa. At four she moved with her father to colonial Kenya, where he built a horse-racing farm near the Great Rift Valley. She grew up hunting alongside local children, and by 17 she was training thoroughbreds professionally. Then she found the air.

Coached by the British pilot Tom Campbell Black, Markham learned to fly and went to work as a bush pilot, spotting elephant and game from the air and radioing their positions to safaris below. Flying over the vast, empty spaces of East Africa taught her something most pilots never learn: how to be utterly alone in the sky and stay calm.

A dramatization of Markham’s life in Kenya from the 1988 biographical film Beryl Markham: A Shadow on the Sun.

West with the night

The Atlantic had been flown east-to-west before, but never solo and non-stop from England — because doing it meant fighting the prevailing westerlies the whole way. Markham took the challenge in a Percival Vega Gull she named The Messenger, aiming for New York’s Floyd Bennett Field.

She flew through the night and most of the next day, some twenty-one hours over open ocean. Then, within sight of the coast, ice choked the fuel-tank vents and starved the engine. The Vega Gull came down nose-first in a peat bog at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Markham climbed out with a gash on her forehead — and into history. She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic solo east-to-west, and the first person to fly non-stop from England to North America.

The book Hemingway envied

Six years later, Markham turned her life into prose. West with the Night, published in 1942, is a memoir of Africa and flight written in language so clear and vivid that it stunned other writers — then promptly sold poorly and fell out of print. For forty years it was all but forgotten.

Its rescue came by accident. In 1982 a California restaurateur read a collection of Ernest Hemingway’s letters and stumbled on one in which the famously hard-to-impress novelist raved about Markham’s writing. He tracked down the book, loved it, and pushed a publisher to reissue it. This time it became a bestseller.

A discussion of Markham’s memoir West with the Night and the writing Hemingway admired.

The horizon beyond

Markham lived the rest of her life in Kenya, training racehorses into her eighties. By the time the rediscovered book made her famous again she was elderly and living in poverty near the Nairobi racetrack; the royalties let her end her days in comfort. She died in Nairobi in 1986. Today a crater on the planet Venus carries her name — a fitting horizon for a woman who never believed in them.

A Percival Vega Gull, the type Markham flew, starting up and taxiing — the sound of the machine that carried her across the ocean.

Sources: Beryl Markham (Wikipedia); West with the Night, Beryl Markham (North Point Press, 1983 [1942]); Mary S. Lovell, Straight on Till Morning; This Day in Aviation; Simple Flying.