Beryl Markham

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Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham by Mary S. Lovell

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, land bank, out of africa

Beryl was notably scathing about their work and in particular thought their zebra-striped seaplane vulgar. 15 HL. Beryl Markham to Paul Brooks, 25 October 1941. 16 HL. Paul Brooks to Beryl Markham, 27 October 1941. 17 HL. Beryl Markham to Paul Brooks, 31 October 1941. 18 HL. R.N. Linscott to Beryl Markham, 4 November 1941. 19 HL. Beryl Markham to R.N. Linscott, 12 November 1941. 20 HL. Paul Brooks to Beryl Markham, 18 November 1941. 21 HL. Beryl Markham to Paul Brooks, 22 November 1941. 22 HL. Beryl Markham to Paul Brooks, 29 November 1941. 23 HL. Paul Brooks to Beryl Markham, 5 December 1941. 24 HL. Beryl Markham to Paul Brooks, 5 December 1941. 25 HL. Paul Brooks to Beryl Markham, 22 December 1941. 26 HL.

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Chalmers, Philip Allan, 1934. 9 Interviews with Miss Florence Desmond, Surrey, March and June 1986; and Florence Desmond, Florence Desmond, Harrap, 1953. 10 ibid. 11 Interview with Beryl Markham, Nairobi, 1986. 12 ibid. Reconstruction based on what Beryl could remember and the writer’s own experiences. 13 Beryl Markham’s first log book; entries date from 11 June 1931 to 10 October 1934. 14 East African Standard, various issues, 1930 and 1931. 15 Interviews with Beryl Markham, Nairobi, March and April 1986; and transcript of a filmed interview with Beryl Markham for the television documentary World without Walls, Kenya, 1984. 16 Information extracted from Beryl Markham’s first log book. 17 Interview with Beryl Markham, Nairobi, April 1986. 18 Daily Express, September 1936. 19 Civil aircraft are recognized by a ‘registration number’, consisting of a prefix and suffix.

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Churchill, Hodder & Stoughton, 1908. 13 Isak Dinesen: The Life of Karen Blixen, Judith Thurman, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980 (p 153). 14 Interview with Beryl Markham, Nairobi, March 1986. 15 ‘Something I Remember’, by Beryl Markham (c. 1944). 16 My African Journey, Winston S. Churchill, Hodder & Stoughton, 1908. 17 Interview with Doreen Bathurst Norman, Jersey, 1986. 18 Unpublished memoir by Miss Margaret Elkington, Rhodes House Library, Oxford, ref. AFR s.1558. 19 Extract from a short story by Beryl Markham entitled ‘Something I Remember’, written in 1943. 20 Extract from unpublished page of manuscript in Beryl Markham’s papers, by kind permission of the late Beryl Markham. 21 There were two sons of Richard Henry Clutterbuck’s first marriage: Henry Baldwin Clutterbuck, and Charles Baldwin Clutterbuck – Beryl’s father. 22 Interview with Mr Nigel N.

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

It is also a story of human identity evolving hand in hand with new technologies. Even as they reveled in their freedom and autonomy in the skies, pilots have long tempered their joy with laments over their perceived loss of control, intuition, and sensation in exchange for greater stability, safety, and capability. Aviatrix Beryl Markham, writing of her bush flying in Africa, saw the decline of “this era of great pilots” much as the era of great sea captains had disappeared, “each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak.” Markham’s lament sounds familiar today, but she was writing in the 1930s.

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Although immersed in an extreme environment, the flight deck remains a workplace where strong professional identities meet rapid technological change, where the autonomy of the skies meets the economically stretched air transport system, and where the individual’s command and responsibility for human life must work within high degrees of government regulation. When we think about automation and technology aboard airliners, we must imagine them within this ever-changing environment. The children of the magenta line are not flying through the same world that Beryl Markham and Robert Buck did. These forces often converge during the critical moments of landing. • • • Every flight is a story, and the climactic moment is the landing, which has always been a focus of piloting skill. It is the most difficult skill for student pilots to learn, and good pilots challenge themselves to land perfectly every time.

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“The twentieth century was born yearning for a new type of hero”: Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 29. The story of the pilot in the twentieth century: Wohl, A Passion for Wings, 30. “If you can’t fly without looking at your airspeed”: Beryl Markham, West with the Night (New York: North Point Press, 2013). Doolittle flew the first instrument flight in 1929: James Harold Doolittle and Carroll V. Glines, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again (New York: Bantam Books, 1992). Richard Hallion, Legacy of Flight: The Guggenheim Contribution to American Aviation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977).

West With the Night by Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham, Louis Blériot, out of africa

West With The Night Beryl Markham For MY FATHER I wish to express my gratitude to Raoul Schumacher for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for this book. I speak of Africa and golden joys HENRY IV, Act V, Sc. 3 Contents BOOK ONE I. Message from Nungwe II. Men with Blackwater Die III. The Stamp of Wilderness IV. Why Do We Fly? BOOK TWO V. He Was a Good Lion VI. Still Is the Land VII. Praise God for the Blood of the Bull VIII. And We be Playmates, Thou and I IX. Royal Exile X. Was There a Horse with Wings? BOOK THREE XI. My Trail is North XII.

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No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. copyright © 1942, 1983 by Beryl Markham cover design by Mimi Bark 978-1-4532-3791-5 Published in 2012 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media 180 Varick Street New York, NY 10014 www.openroadmedia.com Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith

Beryl Markham, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Pepto Bismol, Scramble for Africa, trade route

PART I Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. … It is all these things but one thing—it is never dull. —Beryl Markham CHAPTER ONE When Ewart Grogan pushed off into the White Nile five days before Christmas, 1899, the sun over southern Sudan fell on his back like a hot sheet of metal, and his diseased liver hurt so badly he couldn’t stand up straight. His open boat groaned with supplies and sweating bodies: a dozen native soldiers, a small boy, a tall man from the Dinka tribe, an elderly Egyptian prisoner with a broken leg, and a mad criminal in chains.

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“During the dead calms in these vast marshes the feeling of melancholy produced is beyond description.” “If you can visualize twelve thousand square miles of swamp that seethes and crawls like a prehistoric crucible of half-formed life, you have a conception of the Sudd,” wrote the British pilot and adventurer Beryl Markham. It was “one place in this world worthy of the word ‘sinister.’ ” Another six hours’ paddling brought the steamer to Kero, the next Belgian station. Native soldiers paraded daily in the damp heat to the sounds of bugles and drums. The evening amusement consisted of tossing dynamite in the river and collecting the dead fish that floated up.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

I would turn in as soon as the fire died, as darkness settled over the Mojave. I’d switch on my headlamp, illuminating my little yellow dome against the cold playa. I’d lugged a dozen books with me. They were stacked in piles around the inside of the threadbare tent, which held next to nothing else. I read West with the Night by the pilot Beryl Markham, who flew passengers around Kenya in the 1930s for a shilling a mile. Ernest Hemingway called the book “bloody wonderful” in a letter to a friend: “This girl…can write rings around all of us.” I read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and like the protagonist Ladislaus de Almásy, who brought Herodotus’s Histories into the desert, I began taping maps and sketches into the pages of my books.

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PEACH AND GRAY Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, “Mars: MEC-1 Prototype,” Library of Congress (1965). SIX IN ALL Ibid. PULL-APART ORIGIN Gregory A. Davis, “2009 Penrose Medal Presented to B. Clark Burchfiel, Citation by Gregory A. Davis,” The Geological Society of America (2009). SHILLING A MILE Beryl Markham, West with the Night: A Memoir (New York: North Point Press, 2013), p. 198. HEMINGWAY CALLED THE BOOK Diane Ackerman, “A High Life and a Wild One,” The New York Times (Aug. 23, 1987). LADISLAUS DE ALMÁSY Ondaatje’s protagonist was inspired by the historical figure László Almásy. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 16.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

They had crossed the ocean, without stopping, and they had done it in sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes. When the much more showy and popular Charles Lindbergh single-handedly flew the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island to Le Bourget in 1927, he gave due credit to the pair: Alcock and Brown, he said, had showed him the way. Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham, who in the 1930s separately became the first of their sex to fly the same ocean westward, were not so generous. The ocean is officially described by the two air traffic control centers that have charge of North Atlantic airspace as a region “moderately hostile to civilian air traffic”—it is vast, there are no navigation aids and no communication relays.

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The discovery of longitude. Codfish. Erskine Childers. Winslow Homer. The convoy system. St. Helena. Puerto Madryn. Debussy. Monet. Rachel Carson. Eriksson, Columbus, Vespucci. The Hanseatic League. Ernest Shackleton. The Black Ball Line. The submarine telegraph cable. The Wright brothers, Alcock and Brown, Lindbergh. Beryl Markham. The submarine. Ellis Island. Hurricanes. Atlantic Creek. Icebergs. Titanic. Lusitania. Torrey Canyon. The Eddystone Light. Bathybius. Prochlorococcus. Shipping containers. NATO. The polders. The Greenland ice cap. The United Kingdom. Brazil, Argentina, Canada. The United States of America. All these, and a thousand things and people and beasts and events and occurrences and people, go to make up today’s Atlantic.

Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

And we think she might have been right; there's the climate, for starters, plus acres and acres of fertile farmland and a history worthy of novels. In a fertile strip up above the lip of Lake Nakuru, Njoro was once slated as the potential capital of British East Africa by the influential British settler Lord Delamere. Delamere's close friend Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly westbound solo across the Atlantic, grew up nearby. Although the big dreams for Njoro never materialised, we think it's all the better for it because Njoro retains a dose of magic. It also makes a good base for exploring Lake Nakuru to the south, and Bogoria and Baringo to the north. 1Sights Kenana KnittersWORKSHOP ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0715262303; www.kenanaknitters.wordpress.com; Kenana Farm, off C56; h8.30am-5pm Mon-Fri)F What began as a hobby for three ladies knitting under a tree now employs more than 1200 local people and exports all over the world.

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With cared-for gardens and a small petting zoo that includes llamas and tortoises, it makes a pleasant afternoon picnic spot. 4Sleeping & Eating oKembu CottagesCOTTAGE$$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0722355705, 0722361102; www.kembufarm.com; off C56; camping KSh650, r KSh5000-16,000; p)S Green and peaceful, Kembu Farm has nine cosy cottages set in beautiful gardens on the edge of Njoro. Each cottage tells a story; you can sleep in the restored childhood home of aviator Beryl Markham, in a vintage 1920s railway carriage, or in a hip treehouse. The food is home-cooked and delicious, the welcome is warm and there's real attention to detail, including working fireplaces. Ziwa Bush LodgeLODGE$$$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0707698822; www.ziwalodge.com; off Njoro Rd; s/d full board from KSh14,200/19,500; pW) With fresh, sleek rooms set in spacious, manicured grounds, this small resort marries safari chic with the peace and quiet of the Njoro countryside.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Beryl Markham, British Empire, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, white picket fence

He treats all the important people in East Africa: the corrupt politicians, the actors and actresses who get sick on safari, the decayed English-African nobility. He traveled at the side of Diana, Lady Delamere, as her personal physician when she was growing old, to monitor her blood pressure and heartbeat (she wanted to carry on with her beloved sport of deep-sea fishing off the Kenya coast, although she had a heart condition), and he was also Beryl Markham’s doctor. Markham, the author of West with the Night, a memoir of her years as an aviator in East Africa, used to hang out at the Nairobi Aero Club, where she had a reputation for being a slam-bang, two-fisted drinker. (“She was a well-pickled old lady by the time I came to know her.”) His patient Dr.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

In contrast, Brand and Phelan had an extraordinary time spending several months with two servants, a household pet cheetah, and another couple who lived on the farm who became their friends on safari. Phelan had persuaded Brand to travel to Africa in part because of their shared fascination with Beryl Markham’s memoir West with the Night. The book had long been out of print before it was picked up and republished by a boutique Berkeley publishing house in 1983. Markham, who had been a bush pilot, adventurer, and racehorse trainer and who was the first person to solo nonstop across the Atlantic from east to west, was now down on her luck at the end of her life and living near a racetrack in Nairobi.

Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel by Bruce Conord, June Conord

Beryl Markham, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, feminist movement, if you build it, they will come, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yogi Berra

We had found this one of the most interesting places we had seen in our whole exploration of ruins. 220 n & Tulum, Punta Allen & Sian Ka’an If you’re serious about appreciating the details of many of the Maya ruins in your journeys around the Yucatán, we recommend An Archeological Guide to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, by Joyce Kelly (University of Oklahoma Press), available in paperback. I have a trunk containing continents. ~ Beryl Markham in a PBS interview, 1986 Tulum Pueblo T ulum Pueblo is an undistinguished community that straddles Highway 307 before it’s swallowed up by the jungle along the long southern portion down to Chetumal. We used to call it “Pollo Town” because of the many grills either side of the divided road that grill chickens, pollo asado or pollo carbon.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I asked Cal, “If you were a billionaire and could give 2 to 3 books to every graduating high school senior in the country this year, what would they be?” His answer (updated since the podcast) is: “For everyone: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. For females: West with the Night by Beryl Markham. For males: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. That’s a good start for a journey.” ✸ What would you put on a billboard? “LISTEN.” * * * Joshua Skenes Joshua Skenes (IG: @saisonsf, saisonsf.com) has become famous for his use of fire. As chef-owner of Saison in San Francisco (three Michelin stars), he has classical training and loves his high-end Japanese Nenohi knives, but nothing captures his imagination quite like the open flame.