Beryl spent most of her childhood on what turned into a horse farm, receiving little formal schooling but learning to speak several African dialects, such as Nandi, from the families employed by her father. Her father started a farm at Njoro, but discovered his true talent was in breeding and training horses for racetracks in Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi. She was celebrated as an aviation pioneer.A memoir set mainly in British East Africa from the 1900s to 1936 published in 1942.Īfter coming of age in British East Africa, a young Englishwoman breaks new ground as a pilot, distinguishing herself as the first person leaving from England, to cross the North Atlantic from a westerly direction.Įvents in History at the Time of the Memoirīorn in Leicestershire, England, in 1902, Beryl Clutterbuck (later Markham) moved to Kenya with her family when she was three years old. She thereby became 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 from east to west. After a 20-hour flight, her Percival 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, Canada. On 4 September 1936, she took off from Abingdon, England. When Markham decided to take on the Atlantic crossing, no pilot had yet flown non-stop from Europe to New York, and no woman had completed the westward flight solo, though several had died trying. Markham was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a non-stop solo flight (a westbound flight requires more endurance, fuel, and time than the eastward journey, because the craft must travel against the prevailing Atlantic winds).
But can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen.
"she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. Įrnest Hemingway was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying In 2004, National Geographic Adventure ranked it number 8 in its list of the 100 best adventure books. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature and was included in the United States' Armed Services Editions shortly after its publication. West with the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s, leading to celebrated careers as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot there.
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