Ninety years ago, on September 6, 1936, a plane crash-landed in a bog alongside Baleine Road, near Louisbourg in eastern Cape Breton Island. It had taken off from Abingdon, England 20 hours earlier. At the controls was 36-year-old Englishwoman Beryl Markham.
Although her destination was Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, her flight was nevertheless record-setting for being the first aircraft flown solo by a woman eastbound across the Atlantic.
Markham was flying a British-built Percival Vega Gull, and the reason for her crash-landing was fuel exhaustion. She survived the crash, suffering only a concussion. Locals came to her aid.
“Getting her off the bog, bringing her here to the community and getting help medically – it became a focal point for the community to do something together,” Carter Stevens, a board member at the Sydney and Louisbourg Railway Museum, told CTV News in an interview. The museum houses a sculpture of Markham.
Longtime Louisbourg resident Eva Lewis recalled the event years later. She took in Markham and helped her recover. “Very exciting, naturally,” she told ATV News in 1986, when she was 92 years old. “I’m sure there was way over 100 (people) here in this room. People from Sydney and all around. You see, as soon as they heard about it. they flocked in here.”
Markham, who spent most of her life in British West Africa, later to become Kenya, wrote a memoir entitled West with the Night, where she described her aviation adventures. She also wrote about her friendship with both Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame, and then Blixen’s lover Denys Finch Hatton, with whom she had a romantic relationship after he and Blixen split up.
Very interesting aviation history note. But I would think her Ms Markham’s flight was westbound across the Atlantic.