10/26/2024
Remember the movie "Out of Africa" with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep?
'It's the birthday of Beryl Markham, born Beryl Clutterbuck on this day in 1902 in Leicester, England. She wrote just one book in her life; her 1942 memoir, West with the Night, prompted the following letter from Ernest Hemingway to his editor that same year: "... she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer ... this girl ... can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers."
Hemingway, who typically savaged other writers rather than praising them, had known Markham from a safari he'd taken in Kenya, where she had grown up. Markham's family had moved to colonial East Africa when she was three. Markham learned to speak several African languages and how to hunt wild game with a spear, was once attacked by a friend's pet lion, and fought and killed a deadly black mamba snake.
Markham married a wealthy young Englishman named Mansfield Markham in 1927; the couple moved to England and Beryl gave birth to a son, but her marriage soon ended and she returned to Africa alone.
Back in Africa, Markham took her first plane ride, with a friend who was a big-game hunter and a pilot, and it so thrilled her that she immediately decided she would learn to fly. Within months she earned her pilot's license, bought a plane, and began a career as a bush pilot, delivering supplies and passengers to remote areas, rescuing miners and hunters from the bush, finding elephants and game for wealthy hunters, and learning to land her plane in whatever forest clearing or field was at hand. After less than a year in the cockpit, Markham undertook a daring solo flight from Africa to England and from there determined she would complete a flight no one else had yet dared — a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight from London west to New York City, flying the entire way against the prevailing winds of the jet stream.
On the evening of September 4, 1936, Markham departed from London in a borrowed single-engine Vega Gull capable of flying up to 163 miles per hour and fitted with enough extra fuel tanks to go almost 4,000 miles without stopping. Two hours later, she was seen passing Ireland, then spied by a ship at sea, and then spotted the following day over the tip of Newfoundland. And then she disappeared.
Markham's flight had almost ended earlier, in the Atlantic, when a fuel line froze in the high, thin, cold air, causing the engine to fail and the Vega to nosedive toward the ocean. Just above the water, the line warmed enough to allow gas through and Markham was able to pull her plane back to safety. The same thing happened again just off the edge of Nova Scotia, but this time Markham crash landed nose-first into a peat bog. With her plane now stuck in the mud, she climbed out and hailed a couple of fisherman, calling out, "I'm Mrs. Markham. I've just flown from England."
Markham was certain her flight would be considered a failure — she'd meant to land in New York, after all — but she was picked up by a U.S. Coast Guard plane, which she copiloted back to the city, and was driven in a motorcade through New York City in a flurry of confetti and ticker tape. She returned to England a celebrity and did not take up flying again.
Beryl Markham said, "If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work."
THE WRITER'S ALMANAC
