My plan is to stop in Sydney, near Cape Breton, and refuel, then go on from there—straight south over land this time, New Brunswick and the tip of Maine, and finally to New York. But I am still fifty miles from land when my engine begins to sputter in a sick way, a hiccuping, lurching stall. My final fuel tank is three-quarters full, so it can only be an airlock. As before, I flip the toggle to the petcock on and off, and the engine answers with wheezing. I’m dropping now, and my hopes are crashing, too. Three thousand miles and darkness and near death to fail now, when I’m so close? It’s a terrible thought, a dimming one. Again and again, I flip the sharp petcock switch, my fingers bleeding. The Gull coughs to life, climbing, only to falter once more, my propeller windmilling, my window glazed, glinting back the sun in a pitiless mirror.
For ten or fifteen minutes, I limp this way, in the wounded glide of fuel starvation, nearing the rough lip of landfall. Soon I can see muddy-looking boulders and a bog that’s like black pudding. When I try to bank one final time, my wheels catch and sink, the nose sticking fast, throwing me forward. I smack the glass hard, wetting my forehead with blood. I am only three hundred yards from the water’s edge, nowhere near New York. And yet I have done it.
I am so tired and can barely move, but I do move. I push open the heavy door, and force my feet to the ground. The bog tugs hard at my boots and I sink, blood streaming into my eyes. I drop lower and am half crawling soon, as if after so many hours in the clouds, I have to remember all over again how to walk. As if I must relearn just where I am going, and where—impossibly—I have been.
After her first solo, in June of 1931, Beryl Markham quickly went on to become one of the first women ever granted a professional B licence. Though she never fully stopped training racehorses, or winning derbies, she also became a bush pilot, working for Bror Blixen on numerous safaris, and pioneered the practice of scouting elephants from the air, fulfilling Denys’s vision.
When in 1936, after twenty-one hours of flying, she succeeded in her record-breaking voyage across the Atlantic, she made every significant headline in the States. A crowd of five thousand cheered her arrival in New York, at Floyd Bennett Field. When she returned to England, however, she got no formal reception. Instead, she was greeted by the terrible news that her friend and flying mentor, Tom Campbell Black, had been killed in a plane crash while she was away.
Scandal and speculation followed Beryl for much of her life. In 1942, she published a memoir, West with the Night. It sold only modestly, though many believed it deserved greater accolades, including Ernest Hemingway, who said, in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, “Did you read Beryl Markham’s book…she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was simply ashamed of myself as a writer…it really is a bloody wonderful book.”
Hemingway met Beryl on safari in Kenya, in 1934, when he was traveling with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. Reportedly, Hemingway made a pass at Beryl and was rebuffed. Nearly fifty years later, his eldest son, Jack, showed some of his father’s published letters to a friend, the restaurateur George Gutekunst, including the description of West with the Night. Gutekunst was driven to search out Markham’s book and then convinced a small California press to reissue it. It became a surprise bestseller and allowed Beryl, who was then eighty and living in poverty in Africa, to spend the remainder of her days in relative comfort and even some notoriety.
Since then, the book’s reputation—like its author’s—has been marred by gossip and speculation. It’s been suggested that she didn’t write it at all, but instead that her third husband, Raoul Schumacher, a Hollywood ghostwriter, did. I can’t say I’m surprised by the public’s doubt in her. Beryl was so reluctant to talk about herself, even people who believed they knew her quite well in later life were often surprised to learn she knew anything about flying or horse racing or could write more than a postcard. But the overwhelming evidence attests that Beryl had shown her publisher a large portion of the book (eighteen chapters out of twenty-four) before she ever met Raoul.