Born in England, Beryl Markham (1902 – 1986) moved to Kenya when she was four years old. As a young adult, she became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. Impetuous, single-minded and beautiful, Beryl was a noted non-conformist, even in a colony known for its colorful eccentrics.
She befriended the Danish writer Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, when Blixen was managing her family’s coffee farm in the Ngong hills outside Nairobi. Largely inspired by the British pilot Tom Campbell Black, she took up flying. She worked for some time as a bush pilot, spotting game animals from the air and signaling their locations to safaris on the ground.
When Beryl decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had made the westward flight solo, though several had died trying. She hoped to claim both records. On September 4, 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England. After a 20-hour flight, her Vega Gull, The Messenger, suffered fuel starvation due to icing of the fuel tank vents, and she crash-landed at Baleine Cove on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia (her flight was, in all likelihood, almost identical in length to Mollison’s). In spite of falling short of her goal, Beryl had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic east-to-west solo, and the first person to make it from England to North America non-stop. She was celebrated as an aviation pioneer.
Beryl chronicled her many adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942. After living for many years in the United States, Beryl moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming for a time the most successful horse trainer in the country.