AN EPIC TALE OF ARCTIC SURVIVAL
After his plane went down, Marten Hartwell survived 32 days in the wilderness
In December 1972, the eyes of the world were on Yellowknife.
More than a month after his mercy flight had disappeared into the barrens with three passengers aboard, pilot Marten Hartwell had been found alive. Hartwell, a 47-year-old immigrant who had grown up in wartime Germany and learned to fly as a teenaged glider pilot in the Luftwaffe, had survived 32 days in the wilderness. Both his legs were broken, the snow was a metre deep and the temperature at night dipped to -38 C.
His passengers were dead: Nurse Judy Hill was killed on impact; Neemee Nulliayuk, a pregnant Inuk woman from Spence Bay, had lived for just a few hours more. David Kootook, 14, had survived for three weeks until he too died, of starvation, less than a week before rescuers arrived.
With Hartwell immobilized by his injuries, it fell to young Kootook to do the physical labour of survival. He fashioned a makeshift tent from sleeping bags. The two survivors warmed themselves with a fire made with wood Kootook gathered from the forest.
They stretched their meagre emergency rations for 16 days — a few sandwiches, some corned beef tins, several packages of soup, raisins, tea and coffee — and when they ran out Hartwell and Kootook gnawed on candles, ate snow, even the medication from Hill’s medical kit. The emergency kit had fish hooks and nets, but the nearest lake was too arduous a hike through the waist-deep snow. At one point, the teen hiked away to look for food and was lost for two days before finding his way back to the crash site, exhausted and empty-handed.
When Kootook died on Dec. 1, “of despair and malnutrition” according to the Department of Transport crash investigation, he weighed 75 lbs., 40 lbs. less than he when he boarded the flight. The post-mortem showed he’d been eating tree bark.
Hartwell was alone when military search and rescue experts parachuted into the isolated crash site. They stayed silent about the horror they found.
It would be two months before news leaked out about what had been whispered about for months. Hartwell had survived through cannibalism.
Denise Nulliayuk has a black and white photo of her mother. It was taken around 1950; Neemee looks to be about three or four years old. She wears a sealskin amauti, or parka. A husky pup peers out over her shoulder.
“There are a few things I do remember,” Denise says on the phone from Taloyoak, the tiny Nunavut Hamlet that was once known as Spence Bay.
“I remember seeing her face. She was smiling. It was just like a mother looks at her baby — loving. I remember her feeding me. There are just a couple of things I remember.”
Denise was just two years old when Neemee and David Kootook were loaded aboard a plane to Cambridge Bay, the first leg of their journey to hospital in Yellowknife. Neemee’s pregnancy was difficult and nursing staff said she needed to be in hospital for her labour. David, Neemee’s nephew, was thought to be suffering from appendicitis.
Denise went to stay with her grandparents while Neemee was away. No one ever told her why her mother never came back. She grew up assuming her grandparents were her birth parents. She didn’t even know her birth father still lived in the community.
“As I was growing up, people said to me that I looked like my mom,” Denise said. “I didn’t really understand what they were saying so I just brushed it off. I looked at my grandma and she didn’t look like me.
“As I got older and after I had two or three kids I got curious. OK, where was my mom? If those are not my parents, then where are my parents?”
There were no answers to be found.
“Nobody wanted to talk about it with me,” she said. “They asked me why I was asking about this. They told me I should leave it alone, that I was just causing a lot of pain and suffering for other people. They said I should think about everybody else. That I was being selfish.”
As Denise Nulliayuk was trying to remember, Marten Hartwell was trying to forget. Confined to a wheelchair and still recovering from serious injuries, he ignored a subpoena to appear at the coroner’s inquest in Yellowknife in February 1973. Instead, an RCMP officer read a 24-page statement into the record that Hartwell had prepared with his then-girlfriend, Susan Haley, who later became his wife.
The weather was poor when Hartwell landed his twin-engined Beech 18 in Cambridge Bay on Nov. 8, 1972, having just dropped off some prospectors at a nearby lake. He was planning to fly back to Yellowknife when another flight arrived from Spence Bay, 450 kilometres to the east, with Neemee Nulliayuk and David Kootook aboard. Both patients needed to get to Yellowknife and medical staff urged Hartwell to take them with him.
Though Hartwell had some training to fly using only his instruments, he was not an instrument-rated pilot, meaning he couldn’t legally fly in clouds where he would need to rely on the aircraft’s artificial horizon and other instruments to keep the plane level and on course. But the nurses were desperate to get Nulliayuk to hospital, fearing she wouldn’t survive if she were to go into labour.
Hartwell’s company had a second more modern plane, a Twin Otter, in Cambridge Bay but its pilot said he had other work to do and couldn’t make the 500-kilometre flight to Yellowknife. Hartwell agreed to try, even though his pilot’s licence didn’t allow him to legally fly with passengers under those conditions.
Hartwell took off at about 3:30 p.m. into the rapidly darkening sky, with nurse Judy Hill in the back with her two stretcher-bound patients. He never spoke to his passengers. At one point, Hill brought Hartwell a cup of coffee, but he didn’t even see her face in the darkened cockpit.
An hour into the flight, Hartwell flew through thick clouds and fog as he crossed over the coast and onto the mainland. The visibility dropped to under a mile. But soon the skies cleared again.
“The stars were sparkling and the visibility, well, if there were lights on the ground it would have been unlimited,” Hartwell later told crash investigators.
But there were no lights below for Hartwell to follow and he couldn’t get a signal from the Contwoyto Lake radio beacon he had hoped would lead him to Yellowknife. His magnetic compass, all but useless in the Arctic, swung wildly. Unknowingly, Hartwell was drifting far to the west of his intended track. Disoriented, he brought the aircraft down to 2,000 feet, hoping to pick up the radio beacon while he scanned the featureless barrens for a landmark. Holding the control column with the fingertips of one hand, he spread a map on his lap and flicked on an overhead light.
What he didn’t know was that his aircraft was 250 kilometres off course and heading straight toward an area of high ground, rising to the southwest of Great Bear Lake. Seconds later, the right wingtip clipped the treetops, sending the Beech cartwheeling for 100 metres into the snowcovered hillside.
Hartwell was knocked unconscious in the crash. His nose was broken and he had torn tendons in one of his fingers. Both ankles were broken and his left knee was shattered.
Hill didn’t survive the impact. Nulliayuk suffered a broken back and died later that night.
The Canadian military mounted a massive aerial search, but the emergency transmitter on Hartwell’s plane had failed to go off, giving rescuers no clue where to look.
Susan Haley, who had flown to Yellowknife from Edmonton after her boyfriend went missing, joined in the search, volunteering as a spotter on the search and rescue aircraft. Bundled up against the cold, the spotters tethered themselves to a safety line, then lay flat on the open rear ramp of a Hercules aircraft, scanning the terrain below as the planes crisscrossed the search area.
“You look out and in, out and in, hanging out there in the open air,” Haley said.
Nothing. After three weeks of fruitless flights, the military called off the search. But the families of the missing kept up the pressure. Haley’s father in particular, a prominent academic, was outraged and began lobbying for the search to resume. You wouldn’t stop a search for trapped miners until you were certain there was no hope, he argued.
And privately, the family speculated at what might be happening on the ground, if anyone had survived the impact.
“My father was paying attention … and interestingly enough had already speculated that there might have to be cannibalism,” Haley said in a phone interview from her home in Nova Scotia. “We knew the survival rations were negligible. Planes are required to carry survival rations, but that plane was carrying far fewer than it was supposed to be.”
Thanks to the Haleys’ lobbying, and bowing to public pressure, the military sent planes out again in early December.
On the ground, things were growing desperate for Hartwell. With Kootook dead, Hartwell penned a letter to his son in Germany.
“When you receive this letter, I will be dead,” he wrote. “I have had an accident on Nov. 8, 1972 and I am still laying in the bush with broken legs. Have no more food. Please forgive me for sins. I love you, my only son ... In my heart I was not all that bad.”
But by this time, Hartwell had managed to get the emergency beacon working and turned it on periodically on days he thought aircraft might be searching. On Dec. 7, a passing military aircraft heard the signal. Hartwell was rescued on Dec. 8 by search and rescue techs who parachuted in. They found Hartwell in the shelter. Nulliayuk’s body was covered in snow. David Kootook lay nearby. Judy Hill’s body had been dragged to near the tent entrance and had been partly dismembered with an axe. Hartwell had hacked chunks from her thigh, storing some of the meat in an empty ration box. He hadn’t touched the bodies of Kootook or Nulliayuk.
Susan Haley learned immediately about the cannibalism.
“We were even kind of expecting it,” she said. “The great pity is, I mean, it’s a very hard thing to do. So he didn’t do it until David Kootook died. He and David talked about it and David said he wouldn’t do it and didn’t want to do it.
“There’s a great taboo in human beings in doing that, and it’s utterly disgusting to us to do that. When David died, it was a kind of a wakeup call to Marten, if he was going to live he had to do that,” Haley said.
The irony? At the time of the crash, Hartwell was a practising vegetarian.
“If anyone was going to survive it would be Marten,” Haley said. “He was persistence itself. His whole life story is one of persistence against great odds.”
The Department of Transport would lay most of the blame for the crash on Hartwell, saying “the pilot accepted responsibility for a flight for which he was not qualified” and noting his “self-confidence exceeded ability.” The inquest jury would also recommend improvements to Arctic navigation systems and that aircraft carry better emergency equipment.
News of the cannibalism didn’t become public until two months after the crash, when it was reported by an Edmonton radio station. When the official inquest was held in late February 1973, reporters from around the world crowded into the Yellowknife hotel room to cover it.
Interest was intense. Just a couple of months before, the world had been shocked when rescuers discovered cannibalism among the survivors of plane crash who had been lost more than two months in the Andes Mountains of South America. Alive, a book about their ordeal, became a best-seller.
“It was a pretty big story back then,” said journalist Ken Becker, who covered the inquest for the former United Press International wire service.
“I was just a couple of months in Canada, fresh out of New York. This story got big play in the States. Fleet Street was all over it.
“The story for me was how sad that little boy was,” Becker said. “He just couldn’t eat the flesh. He probably knew he was not going to survive, but he wouldn’t do it.
Though Hartwell refused to attend the inquest, he did speak to reporters from his lawyer’s office in Edmonton.
“I knew that I would also die very soon,” he told reporters in a trembling voice in one of the few times he would ever speak publicly about the crash. “I had no food for three days except snow. I gave up hope for my own survival and tried to acquaint myself with the fact I was going to die.
“There was no way out but to eat human flesh and this I did,” he said.
“‘Why I ate human flesh’ — Hartwell describes ‘starvation madness’ ” read the headline in the Ottawa Citizen after the details of the cannibalism were confirmed at the inquest.
The RCMP investigated the crash, but in the end, decided against laying any charges against Hartwell. He lost his pilot’s licence for a short time, but a few years later he and Haley set up their own airline, flying bush planes out of Fort Norman, N.W.T.
The epic story soon faded from public memory. Hartwell, himself, rarely spoke about it. He refused to be interviewed by journalist Peter Tadman for his 1991 book The Survivor, though he did grant an interview to the CBC in the 1980s.
Hartwell died in 2013 of lung cancer. He was 88.
“Marten was very persistent. A very strong-minded person,” Haley said. “He just got up and soldiered forward.
“Not many people really responded with abhorrence, but there is a deep-seated human taboo against that, so he did feel like a bit of an outcast. And every once in a while some idiot would come out with a newspaper headline and slam him for it. And he felt that — ‘Cannibal pilot,’ you know.”
In Taloyoak, Denise Nulliayuk hadn’t given up trying to find out what had happened to her mother.
“During that time I was doing this, I was going through a lot of rough times and dealing with a lot of stuff on my own. And this was one of the things I felt I needed to deal with to be OK — for myself,” she said.
“This community is like a family. Nobody wanted to deal with the fact that she was gone and she wasn’t going to come back. There’s nothing anybody can do to bring her back or make it better. The only way to make it better is to deal with it. You can’t shove everything under the rug and expect it to be OK. It can’t be.”
Eventually, a friend in Ottawa heard about what Denise was doing and offered to help. The friend went to the library in Ottawa and sent a package with photocopied material.
Denise was shocked by what she read.
“I got a couple of sentences in and I couldn’t read it anymore. I just put it back,” she said. “Eight months later I finally got the guts and the courage to look at it, one page at a time. It is very tough.
“There are things that I don’t think that I want to read about what happened to my mom, but at the same time I have to know.”
She said it took her “two or three years” to get through all the material.
But where was her mother’s body? She’d been told her mother had been buried in Yellowknife. She turned to a reporter from Northern News Service for help, but he could find no trace of her grave. Eventually, she enlisted the help of an Inuk lawyer who found Neemee’s grave in Edmonton.
After some media attention in the North, the government of Nunavut agreed to pay to have Neemee’s remains brought back to Taloyoak for burial.
Now, nearly 45 years after the crash, Denise said her anger has faded.
“A lot of people think they know what I should be feeling about the pilot,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion over the phone line.
“There are procedures to follow. I don’t understand why they didn’t follow those procedures,” she said.
“At the same time, I try to put myself in his shoes. He sees these two people — if he can do something about them, to help them. Yes, I do sometimes feel a little bit upset about the whole situation, but at the same time it sounded more like, it sounded like he was thinking more of the people than himself.
“How can I be upset with him? I think he’s the only one who tried to do anything to help.”
Hartwell spent months in a wheelchair after the crash and was left with one leg shorter than the other. He walked with a limp the rest of his life.
“It took him a long time to stagger to his feet,” Haley said. “He also had a long period of nightmares and what now would probably be called PTSD.”
Hartwell even survived another crash, walking 30 kilometres back to the airfield after crashing his Cessna float plane into the tree canopy near Fort Norman when he and Susan ran their bushplane business.
“I now realize that Fort Norman saved Marten’s sanity,” Haley wrote on her blog in 2015. “It was a place where he did not feel the potential for scorn and moral disapproval that came after his very public exposure as a cannibal. And the people protected him. No one ever mentioned it. They all knew; but they kept their own counsel about it.”
The pain of losing her mother — and the awful truth of what happened after the crash — has lessened for Denise Nulliayuk.
“It’s not too hard for me to talk about anymore,” she says.
It saddens her to think about the suffering of her cousin, David Kootook.
“When they did the autopsy he had birch traces in his stomach,” she said. “He was eating trees. The pilot told him (David) he should eat the nurse and he said no. He said, ‘I’m not going to do that to her. She’s never done anything to me.’
The jury at the coroner’s inquest recommended Kootook’s heroism be recognized. He was awarded a meritorious service cross posthumously by the governor general. A boat was named in his honour. Stompin’ Tom Connors immortalized him in his song, The Marten Hartwell Story (“Yes, Davey Kootook died a saint, a credit to his people.”)
But Denise regrets that the official investigation into the crash ignored her mother’s unborn child, Denise’s little sister.
“They didn’t accept my mom’s baby as a living human being. She had a baby girl.”
She’s grateful that Neemee’s remains were brought home to Taloyoak.
“Now the whole community can visit her,” Denise said.
Does she go herself to the grave of the mother she barely knew?
“Once in a long while,” she says.
I knew that I would also die very soon. I had no food for three days except snow. I gave up hope for my own survival and tried to acquaint myself with the fact I was going to die.