Cannibals (6 page)

. . . very somber, ill-looking fellow, who walked in a stooping attitude, and whose pale face, livid complexion, and deep-set eyes under a pair of coarse and bushy eyebrows, which met across the forehead, were sufficient to repel any one from seeking his acquaintance. Gilles seldom spoke, and when he did it was in the broadest patois of his country. His long grey beard and retiring habits procured him the name the Hermit of St. Bonnot, though no-one for a moment attributed to him any extraordinary amount of sanctity.

(Sidky, H. – 1997)

Unfortunately the young child died a few days following the attack due to the severity of its injuries. Over 50 witnesses identified the wolf-man to be Gilles Garnier and he was sentenced to appear in court. He willingly confessed to every charge against him and he was sentenced to death.

He was executed on January 8, 1574, which clearly disproves the myth that a werewolf has to be killed with a silver bullet – he was in fact burned to death at the stake!

The survivors of a plane crash in the mountains of Chile had to resort to cannibalism in an effort to stay alive

Rugby had always been on the curriculum at the Stella Maris school for boys in Carrasco, Uruguay. After leaving the school and moving on to further education, the ex-pupils missed the sport and decided to do something about it. They were passionate about rugby and so in 1964 they organized six other teams from around Montevideo and formed the Rugby Union of Uruguay. The group known as the ‘Old Christians’ grew in strength as the years went by and in 1971 they were invited to play a match in Santiago, Chile. To keep the costs down the group chartered a plane from the Uruguayan Air Force as their rates were far lower than those of any commercial airline. It was a thoroughly enjoyable trip and so when they were invited back the following year the Old Christians were only too happy to accept.

Again they chartered a plane from the Uruguayan Air Force and this time asked friends and family to join them on their trip to Chile. On the morning of October 12, 1972, the passengers started to arrive at the small international airport. Apart from the players and their friends and family, their was an independent traveller by the name of Graziela Mariani who had bought her ticket directly from the Air Force so that she could attend her eldest daughter’s wedding in Santiago. She had taken the last remaining seat and was consequently travelling on her own.

It was around 7.40 a.m. when the passengers heard the announcement over the loud speaker to start boarding the plane. They all walked across the tarmac to the waiting plane, which was a Fairchild FH-277D. They took off from Carrasco at 8.02 a.m. and on board were 40 passengers and five crew members.

For the first three hours the flight ran smoothly and it was around 11.00 a.m. that the Andes came into view, shrouded in clouds. As the Fairchild could only fly at a height of 22,500 feet it was necessary to fly through the Andes rather than over them, and the pilots, Col. Ferradas and Lt. Col. Lagurara, were used to negotiating the designated gaps between the mountains. Aware that the clouds could signify that there was some bad weather in front of them, Lagurara radioed ahead and their suspicions were confirmed. They decided the safest thing to do would be to land in Mendoza, as it would be too risky flying through the Andes. When they landed they were informed that the weather would not be easing up until the next day, and so the passengers were advised that they would be spending the night in Mendoza.

The passengers and the crew managed to check themselves into hotels, and they were all advised to be back at the airport by noon the following day. Both crew and passengers took advantage of the stopover and purchased several bottles of the local wine.

The Fairchild aeroplane took off from Mendoza at 2.18 on the afternoon of October 13. They had waited for the bad weather to clear up, and it was decided that it was now safe to negotiate the route through the mountains, known as Planchon Pass. The co-pilot, Lt. Col. Lagurara, had been flying the plane throughout the entire flight and the passengers were quite happy and seemed to be enjoying themselves. At 3.24 p.m. Lagurara radioed to Santiago and informed them that he was flying over Curico. Santiago Control acknowledged this and then told him to turn north and start his descent to 10,000 feet. This would have been alright if the plane had in fact been over Curico, but a headwind had slowed the plane considerably and Lagurara’s report was inaccurate – in reality they were just over Planchon which was still within the mountain range. As the plane dropped into the clouds they started to experience turbulence and the ‘Fasten Seat Belts’ sign was illuminated, while the stewards walked up and down the aisle to make sure the passengers were safely buckled in. Just as the steward took his seat at the back of the cabin, the plane hit two air pockets and sunk into the clouds revealing mountains on all sides. The immediate reaction of the pilots was to put the engines into full throttle and try to pull the plane out of the mountains. However, the air was too thin for the propellers to grab onto and flying at around 14,000 feet the wing on the right-hand side of the plane clipped a jagged mountain peak.

The wing splintered off and smashed down onto the fuselage forcing the tail section of the plane to fall off at the galley. Within a matter of seconds the other wing hit the mountainside and tore off, dropping to the ground in fragments. In the first few minutes of the crash five people at the rear of the cabin actually fell to their deaths through the gaping hole where the tail of the aeroplane had been.

The plane continued to drop rapidly, crashing down onto the mountainside. The fuselage careened down an 80-degree slope just like a toboggan. The sudden decrease in speed caused the passenger seats to come loose from their mountings and to fall forward en masse. As the plane continued its snowy descent the passengers could be heard praying loudly. As the slope began to level off and the snow got deeper the nose of the Fairchild started to crumple, and in so doing, it sandwiched the pilots in the cockpit, before the fuselage finally came to an abrupt halt in a deep bank of snow. Those passengers who were able to move managed to climb out of the hole of the plane where the tail had once been. Back inside the plane a couple of the rugby players were desperately trying to extricate some of the passengers from their trapped seats. When they had freed as many people as they could, they discovered that only three people in the passenger cabin were dead. The team doctor, Dr. Nicola and his wife, Esther, and Eugenia Parrado, who was the mother of one of the rugby players, Nando Parrado.

Many of the survivors of the crash had serious injuries and they realized it was hopeless as they did not have either the knowledge or the medical supplies to treat them. As the cockpit was not accessible from the cabin, one of the passengers, Moncho Sabella, decided to try and access it from the outside. He climbed along the side of the fuselage using seat cushions as snow shoes, and he managed to get inside the cockpit through a foward cabin door that was slightly ajar. Both the pilot and co-pilot were crushed between the instrument panel and the rear bulkhead, and although Ferraras was dead, his co-pilot was still alive, albeit terribly injured. Sabella went for assistance, but despite their brave efforts, Lagurara was beyond their help. The passengers decided the best thing to do was to try and settle down for the night, but without any blankets or anything to stop the arctic air from blowing in, they all found the cold unbearable. They decided they should try and plug the hole at the rear of the plane, and using suitcases, seats, and indeed whatever other debris they could find, they started to build a makeshift wall in the back of the plane.

The following morning, now October 14, the weather conditions were just as bad. During the night four people had died, and Grazeila Mariani died of her injuries later that morning. Of the 45 people who set out from Montevideo two days before, only 27 were left alive.

The survivors of the crash never gave up hope in the following days that they would be rescued and it was on the third day that they heard the sound of a plane flying overhead. They rushed out onto the snow and screamed as loud as they could, waving their hands frantically in the air. They felt sure the plane had seen them, but when no help arrived the truth started to sink in – nobody knew they were there.

There were two medical students among the survivors and they made regular checks of the injured. To help make them more comfortable they devised some simple hammocks by using luggage webbing and some poles that were stowed in the luggage compartment. Another one of the survivors, Fito Strauch, invented a water-making device using a piece of aluminium out of the back of one of the seats. He managed to bend it into a spout, which he filled with snow and wedged between two suitcases. At the bottom of the spout he placed a bottle and when the sun melted the snow, it poured into the bottle. He managed to stockpile quite a few bottles of water by using this method.

Their food supply was very sparse and all that was now left was some chocolate, nougat, crackers and jam. They also had some large bottles of wine and brandy that the pilots had purchased in their stopover at Mendoza. This, however, was not sufficient for the 26 survivors. They rationed the food out as best they could, but it was clear that if they were not rescued soon they would totally run out of supplies. They knew that if they didn’t find another source of food they were all destined to die.

The survivors turned to one another with a look of grim resignation on their faces, they knew the only way they were going to survive this ordeal was to eat the flesh of their dead companions. One of the passengers, Canessa, who was one of the first ones to mention the idea, went out into the snow and, using a shard of glass, cut off several slivers of flesh from one of the bodies that had been laid out near the fuselage. He brought the flesh back to the others and, one by one, they forced the meat down their throats, some retching as they took the meat. A few of the passengers actually refused to take part, but as the dwindling supplies of chocolate ran out, even they were forced to eat human flesh.

They had a stock of ten bodies in their makeshift cemetery, and they all agreed that Parrado’s mother, sister and Methol’s nephew, were not to be used unless they became desperate. Just like the chocolate, the meat was rationed out. As the protein took effect on their weak bodies, the survivors started to grow stronger and they started to make plans on how they could best get out of the mountains.

The survivors took it in turns to make expeditions through the mountains, mostly in the effort to find the missing tail portion of the plane. They did this for two reasons firstly because they felt that their friends who had fallen out over the mountain may possibly still be alive and living in the wreckage, and secondly because they wanted to get to the batteries. The one remaining crew member, Carlos Roque, who happened to be the mechanic, told them that if they could find the batteries contained in the tail, they would be able to run the plane’s radio and thus signal for help.

On their second expedition up the mountain, the survivors managed to find the bodies of the six men who had fallen from the plane, the wreckage of the left wing, but no sign of the missing tail portion. Canessa, Parrado and Vizintin were the ones who eventually found the tail. It was to the east of the fuselage and about 500 feet further down the valley. It took them almost three hours to reach it, but although they successfully located the batteries they were too heavy to transport back to the fuselage. They came back empty-handed but had worked out a plan to take the radio and Roy Harley with them back to the tail, so that he could hook it up. However, their mission was unsuccessful as the transmitter and the batteries were not of the same voltage.

On the 17th night spent on the mountain, the survivors were hit by an avalanche which swept down the valley and covered the whole of the fuselage. The snow even forced its way through their makeshift wall at the back of the cabin, covering all the survivors. All that is, except four – Echavarran, Nogueira and Vinzintin were asleep in their hammocks, and Harley was woken by the noise and managed to stand up before the snow swept over him. They frantically dug in the snow for their friends, but eight of the nineteen survivors had been buried alive in the snow.

One hour later a second avalanche hit the wreckage but, because the entrance was already blocked by snow, it simply swept right over the top of the fuselage. This meant that what remained of the plane was now completely buried in snow. There was very little room left in the cabin, and without their blankets and shoes which were buried in the snow, the remaining survivors struggled to keep warm.

As soon as they spotted the first rays of daylight the group started to burrow through the snow at the front of the fuselage and managed to get through to the pilots’ cabin. Because of the tilt of the plane the window in the cockpit was above the level of the snow, but when Roy Harley poked his head out of a hole in the window he discovered that a snowstorm had set in. They had to stay for three days inside their frozen tomb. It wasn’t until the morning of November 1 that the snow eased up and they started on the task of digging themselves out. It took them a couple of days, but they managed to make a tunnel out of the rear of the fuselage and up to the surface. They removed as much snow as they could by taking it out through the tunnel, and also removed the bodies of their friends who had died in the avalanche.

On the 62nd day following the crash, Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintin set out on an expedition to the west, where they hoped they would find Chile. With them they carried a sleeping bag, which they had made up from the plane’s insulation, and a ration of food. They knew the journey ahead was going to be arduous as they had to make a steep ascent up the mountains. They climbed and climbed until the last of the sun had disappeared behind the mountain. As dusk fell they set up camp and managed to keep warm throughout the night with their makeshift sleeping arrangements. After three days of climbing they realized that their food rations were not going to last and so they voted and opted for Vizintin to return to the plane. Using a seat cushion for snow shoes it took him only two hours to slide back down the mountain, when it had taken them three days to climb that far. On the fourth day of their expedition the men found that they were starting their descent down the other side of the mountain. It took four more days to reach the bottom where they found green fields and to their delight a rancher who was tending his cattle.