Pioneering pilot remembered in Cape Breton 90 years after historic flight

90 years ago, a woman landed her plane in Cape Breton and achieved a ‘flying first’.

Ninety years ago Saturday, Beryl Markham made aviation history in a quiet corner of Cape Breton.

“You hear about Amelia Earhart but this particular lady, she was a real adventurist,” said Carter Stevens, a board member at the Sydney and Louisbourg Railway Museum.

Markham’s plane crash-landed in a bog in Baleine, N.S., on Sept. 5, 1936.

She was trying to fly from England to New York City. It was the first solo flight east-to-west across the Atlantic Ocean.

At the Sydney and Louisbourg Railway Museum, they are still telling the story of how telephone switchboards lit up that day.

“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,” Stevens said.

Ninety years later, a monument still stands near the spot where Markham crash-landed her plane.

The remoteness of the area does nothing to suggest how people began flocking there nine decades ago to try to meet the woman who had made history.

“Very exciting, naturally,” recalled Louisbourg resident Eva Lewis in a September 1986 interview with ATV News for the 50^th anniversary of Markham’s flight.

The pioneering pilot, who likely had a concussion, was taken to the home of Lewis and her husband – Louisbourg mayor George Lewis – to recover.

In 1986, Eva Lewis – then 92 years old – fondly remembered hosting Markham, whose flight quickly made worldwide headlines.

“They say there was a few people from Sydney came,” she recalled. “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 later wrote a book called West With The Night, capturing both the exhilaration and loneliness of flying more than 20 hours over pitch black ocean with no radio.

Markham died in Kenya in 1986 but in Louisbourg and in Baleine, her legacy lives on.

“It brought the community together,” Stevens said. “It showed how people can help one another.”

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