Beryl Markham

Beryl Clutterbuck was born on October 26, 1902, in Ashwell, England. At age four, her father moved the family to British East Africa (now Kenya), building a farm in Njoro near the Great Rift Valley. Growing up hunting barefoot with local Kipsigis and Maasai children and mastering their languages, she learned racehorse breeding and training from her father, becoming at age eighteen the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Africa and winning the Kenya Derby multiple times.

In the 1930s, she took up aviation, mentored by British pilot Tom Campbell Black. She worked as a bush pilot across Kenya, Sudan, and Tanganyika, scouting big game from the air. On September 4, 1936, Markham took off from Abingdon, England, in a single-engine Vega Gull named The Messenger. Battling fierce headwinds, zero visibility, and fuel line freezing over the Atlantic for 21 hours and 25 minutes, she made a crash-landing in a bog at Baleine, Nova Scotia, Canada, successfully becoming the first person ever to complete a solo non-stop transatlantic flight from east to west (against the prevailing westerly winds). In 1942, she published her lyrical memoir 'West with the Night'. Upon reading it, Ernest Hemingway wrote: 'She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers... it is a bloody wonderful book.'