Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly east to west across the Atlantic, was undoubtedly an atheist. Raised in colonial Kenya by her British expatriate father, Markham was a “wild child” who spent much of her youth hunting—half naked—with local African tribesmen. There is no evidence she ever received religious instruction or attended church. In fact, she received only two-and-a-half years of formal education; she was expelled after she fomented a “revolution” against her school. According to Mary S. Lovell, Markham’s biographer, Denys Finch Hatton—her first great love—read from the Bible to her at night. But the Eton-educated Hatton, who had (according to Sara Wheeler, his biographer) “left his faith in the nursery,” considered the Bible literature, a collection of “stories.” Lovell concludes that “if Beryl had any religious beliefs at all, Denys put paid to it by intellectual debate.”
In colonial Kenya, Beryl Markham was no anomaly. Most Brits there were not only areligious, but openly defiant of traditional religious mores. Markham’s many aristocratic friends and acquaintances, Hatton included, viewed Kenya as a refreshing escape from the stifling morality of British society. These hedonistic expatriates partied nightly; Markham herself often danced the night away at the parties she regularly attended. Heavy drinkers and drug users, these adulterous colonials (in the words of Philip Hoare) “turned Kenya into a byword for decadence.”
Markham is one of the most accomplished—and most interesting—atheists who ever lived. In 1933, she become Kenya’s first woman to earn a “B” pilot license, which allowed her to fly paying customers throughout the continent. To earn her license, Markham had to strip an airplane engine, clean its jets and oil filters, change the plugs, and adjust the magneto points. During the 1935–1936 safari season, she worked long hours scouting elephants in a single-engine plane equipped with only a compass, a turn and bank indicator, and an altimeter. This work was incredibly risky; plane engines were unreliable, and if she had ever gone down in the bush, Markham had no way to summon help. (In 1931, Hatton himself had died in a fiery crash). Tom Black, Markham’s flight instructor, constantly discouraged her from doing this work, to no avail.
Today, it is hard to comprehend the dangers Markham faced when she crossed the Atlantic in 1936. Back then, planes had no radios and only basic instrumentation. On her Vega Gull plane, she had only a turn and slip indicator, a gyro direction-finding compass, and a fore-and-aft reader to measure her rate of climb. Like electric cars today, planes had minimal range and required constant fuel stops. To fly the Atlantic, Markham’s plane had six separate gas tanks bolted to the underside. They carried 255 gallons for a range of 3,800 miles. But to prevent air lock from developing, Markam had to let one tank run dry before manually opening the valve on the next tank. In the dark of the night, she had to do this by feel, all the while gliding over the Atlantic until she could restart her engine. During one change of gas tanks, she dropped to 300 feet above the sea before the engine kicked in. Later, after her engine failed and she crash-landed in a Newfoundland bog, Markham incorrectly concluded she had run out of gas. It was later ascertained that ice had formed over the engine’s air intake, a danger of which (among many others) she was probably unaware.
Flying wasn’t the only male-dominated occupation Markham mastered. In fact, from age twenty until her death in 1986, she consistently beat men at “their own game”: horse racing. She had an uncanny ability to identify a horse’s potential, a skill she especially needed because, like her father, Markham had little money to invest during her lifetime and died almost penniless. For example, Messenger Boy was a thoroughbred eschewed at auction because he had killed a groom and attacked the great trainer Fred Darling, who called Messenger Boy one of the few “truly insane” horses he had ever encountered. For a few hundred pounds, Markham acquired the horse and trained him to become (in Lovell’s words) “one of the leading sires in Kenya racing.”
“The Splendid Outcast,” a story Markham wrote about Messenger Boy, illustrates her deep understanding of a thoroughbred’s emotional state. Surrounded by men restraining him in the auction ring, Messenger Boy is a “trapped and frustrated creature, magnificent and alone, away from his kind, remote from the things he understands, [facing] the punishment of his minuscule masters.” When his buyer approaches the horse and turns his back, Messenger Boy also expresses “frustration—but of a new kind. It is a thing he does not know—a man who neither cringes in fear nor threatens with whips and chains. It is a thing beyond his memory perhaps—as far beyond it as the understanding of the mare that bore him.” When the buyer mutters “an incantation,” the horse “seems to understand … [its] spirit. … He snorts, but does not move” as the buyer strokes his golden mane.
Besides Messenger Boy, Markham developed many other champions during her long career. Her work ethic belied the prevalent view that women were constitutionally weaker than men and were especially liable to “wilt” in Kenya’s tropical climate. “Sweat + smarts” constituted “the secret formula” that other trainers sought to pry from her. Markham knew how to tailor her training methods and even equine feed to each horse’s individual needs. Most trainers built stalls in traditional “rows,” but Markham—believing that horses were social creatures—arranged stalls so that her horses could see and communicate with one another. The late Robin Higgin, an expert on Kenya’s racing history, said Markham “was unquestionably the most brilliant trainer Kenya has ever known.”
Near the end of her life, Markham said she understood horses better than humans. In fact, she loved horses as she loved all animals. But as with flying, two other factors also explain her successes. First, as Rose Cartwright once wrote, “Some people are scared and they hide their fear, but Beryl never knew fear. Not when she rode the liveliest horse, not when she flew the Atlantic.” Cartwright is exaggerating but only slightly. Markham never let fear get the best of her because she never measured herself against other people or, for that matter, “the will of god.” Rather, she measured herself against her own goals and always acted (in Lovell’s words) with a “limitless faith in herself.” Her “limitless faith” had a counterpart: when Markham wanted something, “she went after it with a single mindedness almost frightening in its intensity. Nothing was allowed to stand in her way.”
“Nothing,” however, included her friends, whom (in Lovell’s words) she “used … with breathtaking ruthlessness.” Always aware of how her lissome beauty and impeccable dress mesmerized people, Markham had no qualms about asking friends for money, labor, or transportation. She paid no heed to her promiscuous reputation: sex, after all, was merely a means of satisfying two persons’ needs. Yet, as Lovell painstakingly documents, Markham’s friends and admirers loved her and never failed to support this goal-oriented woman who always practiced what she preached: “Live each moment to the utmost, and never look ahead.” But while Markham’s friends looked beyond her obsession with goals, she always blamed her “own stupidity” when she failed. When her plane crashed in Newfoundland before she reached her trans-Atlantic destination—New York—she blamed her own miscalculations, considered the flight a failure, and could not fully grasp why Americans considered her a hero.
Most British expatriates, including Markham’s father, viewed African natives as inferiors and often treated them harshly. But Markham developed relationships with, and a knowledge of, natives, which were (in Lovell’s word) “rare.” She quotes one of Markham’s close friends: “Beryl really thought more like an African than a European; she had no trace whatsoever of the expatriate view of Africans. She was almost the only person I knew who really understood them.” Lovell notes, too, that unlike most of her contemporaries, Markham never viewed gays as sexual “deviants.” Her ability to compromise was illustrated when Buster Parnell—a famous Irish jockey—arrived in Kenya to ride for her stable. She told him that he would ride two of her eight horses running the next day. Parnell said he would ride all eight mounts or return on the next plane. “Yes, sweetie, that’s what I said,” Markham replied, “You ride the eight.” Parnell won six races and took two second places.
In the views of many, myself included, Beryl Markham’s greatest accomplishment was her autobiography, West with the Night, a book Ernest Hemingway called “bloody wonderful.” Through its enthralling lyrical language, the book conveys less about Markham’s actual life than (in the words of Rose Field) “a poet’s feeling for her land, an adventurer’s response to life and a philosopher’s evaluation of human beings and human destinies.” To capture its essence in a few paragraphs is impossible. Markham herself once wrote that only a person “steeped from childhood in Africa’s endless, even beat” can truly experience Africa’s “soul”: its “integrity,” “the slow inexorable pulse of its life,” as well as its “singular rhythm.” The same is true of West with the Night, in which a reader must from beginning to end “steep” oneself to truly grasp its “soul.”
Nevertheless, to encourage readers to experience more of its poetic wisdom, I offer a small sampling of Markham’s reflections and observations in West with the Night. It was, unfortunately, the only book she ever wrote:
On Africa
[T]he host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing but never solved. It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings. It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts. It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.
On the African Warthog
I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains—the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. Even his weapons are plebeian—curved tusks, sharp, deadly, but not beautiful, used inelegantly for rooting as well as for fighting.
On Moving to a New Place
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved, and where all your yesterdays are buried deep—leave it any way except a slow way, leave it in the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. … [T[he future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it.
On Labor and Human ‘Dignity’
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things—the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold—were false to you. … 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.
… [H]uman beings … drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets—and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other…
On Human ‘Knowledge’
You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.
On Why People Attend Horse Races
I have wondered sometimes if it is the beauty of a running-horse that brings so many people of so many kinds to [a race track], or if it is the magnetism of a crowd, or if it is only the banal hope of making an easy shilling? Perhaps it is none of these. Perhaps it is the unrecognized expectation of holding for an instant what primordial sensations can be born again in the free strength of flashing flanks and driving horses beating a challenge against the ground.
On Human Flight
We fly, but we have not “conquered” the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as many understand. It is when we presume to intimacy, having been granted only tolerance, that the harsh stick falls across our impudent knuckles and we rub the pain, staring upward, startled at our own ignorance.