Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham didn’t get a hero’s welcome when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She crash-landed on what looked like a safe, green field but was actually a rock-strewn peat bog. She got out of her battered plane with a gashed head dripping blood and trudged through the muck for hours before she found someone who could help her.

Her flight, against the prevailing winds, was seven hours longer — and tougher — than Amelia Earhart’s opposite flight four years earlier. No one had yet flown nonstop from Europe to New York, though several people had tried and perished in the attempt. Markham had her sights on that record.

But after about twenty hours of coffee- and chicken-sandwich-sustained sleepless navigation, the fuel tank vents on her Vega Gull froze at altitude, choking off fuel to the engine and forcing her to crash-land nose-first in Nova Scotia.

Wandering exhausted through the bog and thinking she would probably die, Markham