She soon divorced her unchosen husband and took to the skies.īy her twenties, she was the only woman working as a licensed pilot in all of Africa, soaring through the clouds in her light two-seater plane affectionately known as the Kan for the registration letter VP-KAN painted in silver on its turquoise body, which blazed across the daylight as “a small gay complement to the airy blue of the sky, like a bright fish under the surface of a clear sea,” and flitted through the night as “no more than a passing murmur, a soft, incongruous murmur above the earth.” Beryl Markham in her twentiesĪs the only freelance pilot of any gender in all of Kenya throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she delivered oxygen to dying miners, tracked herds of wildlife, and swooped in to save fellow pilots who had crashed in the middle of the desert, striding out of the Kan in her white flying suit and her natural Hollywood glamor like some sort of rugged angel of salvation. By the time she was a tall and lanky teenager, she could wrestle the Nandi way, readily lifting her opponent over her head to throw him to the ground.Īt eighteen, after her father left for Peru, having sold off all of his possessions and sold his only daughter into a marriage to their neighbor, Beryl persevered by becoming a professional racehorse-trainer - the only female in a fiercely competitive world, in which most were older than her by decades. With her childhood best friend - a Kenyan boy named Kibii - she learned to jump as high as her head, because Kibii’s elders from the Nandi tribe believed that no man who couldn’t was any good. As a little girl, she survived an attack by lion. Beryl Markham two waysīorn to English parents and raised by her single father, Beryl grew up in the untrammeled bush of East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, running barefoot and spear-hunting with the local boys and men.

Known to the world as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West with the sweep of night, against headwinds and storms particularly ferocious in that direction, she is Amelia Earhart without the pomp, Thoreau with muscle and humor, a luckier Shackleton of the sky.

No one has written more lusciously about that pilgrimage, nor undertaken it with more elemental daring, than Beryl Markham (October 16, 1902–August 3, 1986).

“For a moment of night,” Henry Beston wrote in his exquisite century-old love letter to darkness, “we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.”

Beryl markham hemingway