I took this account
of the man Jimmie Angel from the internet.
Jimmie Angel and Angel Falls - The truth behind the
legend
Seventy two years ago, on the 9th of October 1937, US
bush pilot James Crawford Angel, better known as Jimmie, carefully positioned
his Flamingo monoplane "El Rio Caroni" for a landing on top of the vast
heart-shaped mesa mountain Auyan-tepui in Venezuela's isolated Gran Sabana
region.
According to Jimmie's later accounts, the plan was to stay a
few days and search for gold, But in such a wild and distant region of Venezuela
plans seldom run smoothly.
When the plane hit a soft spot on the tepuy during the landing it nosed-up, damaging the fuel line.
The accident left Jimmie, his wife Marie, fellow explorer
Gustavo Heny and Miguel Delgado, Heny's gardener, unharmed but they were now
stranded atop Auyan-tepui.
The only way down was on foot, across unmapped
terrain and with limited supplies. Eleven days later, exhausted but alive, the
party reached Kamarata on the other side of the tepuy. As news of their
adventure spread Jimmie Angel's name became inextricably linked with the
waterfall that he had first seen in 1933: Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in
the world and Venezuela's greatest natural treasure.
Jimmie Angel and his
exploits have since become the stuff of legend for anybody visiting Venezuela.
Jimmie's plane remained on top of the Auyan-tepui for thirty three years before being lifted
out by helicopter. It was restored at the Aviation Museum in
Maracay and now sits
outdoors on the front of the airport at Ciudad Bolivar airport, where modern-day
tourists start their trips to Angel Falls.
Jimmie
Angel and his wife Maria
So who was Jimmie Angel?
Karen
Angel, Jimmie's niece, who has been tracking down the truth about his exploits
for the Jimmie Angel Historical Project, a not-for-profit organization she runs
from the United States.
"Jimmie Angel loved his airplane "El Rio Caroni". He would
never have intentionally harmed it. He also had an important job coming up with
the American Museum of Natural History and was to be the pilot-guide for the
1938-1939 Phelps’ Venezuelan Expedition to Auyan-tepui. Losing his plane on the
mountain meant he could not do the AMNH job. So it was a big hardship. Jimmie
didn't have extra money tucked away for a rainy day. He and Marie had to leave
Venezuela in 1937 to obtain a new plane and did not return until 1938".
"Marie loved being with Jimmie on his adventures. She acted as
his navigator. They were very much in love and she was very devoted to him. She
only went back to the USA later because the two children became ill with
malaria. Both his wives, Virginia his first wife and Marie, were good-looking
redheads who loved adventure".
"Jimmie definitely thought the river of gold was up there. He
also knew that bush pilots who didn't prepare didn't make it back home. And
Jimmie was a very good bush pilot.
He wasn't that well known in the United States but he was very
famous in South America. Ornithologist Thomas E. Gilliard's articles about him
in the Saturday Evening Post and the Natural History magazine in the United
States spread his story. And Ruth Robertson's 1949 article for National
Geographic was important, because it proved Angel Falls was the highest
waterfall in the world".
In 1994 Karen Angel decided it was time to go
to Venezuela and saw Auyan-tepui and the falls for herself and signed up
for a tour. She met so many people who had heard of Jimmie Angel but there was
so little accurate information that she felt she should do something to set the
story straight, to fill in the gaps and give a more rounded picture of the man.
In 1996 Karen started the Jimmie Angel Historical Project and commenced doing
research by interviewing people who knew him and explored the archives that
contained information about him. Karen climbed Auyan-tepui in 1994. She have also been to the
base of the waterfall by canoe twice, in 1994 and 2002. But it wasn't just the
falls she wanted to see. Jimmie was really close to the Pemon people of the area and he
and Marie adopted a young child called Jose Manuel Ugarte.
She didn't expect
to find him but he was in Kamarata when she arrived in 1994. He was 78 years old
and was building a house for one of his sons. He had six children. She also
met two "cousins" Santo and Nered Ugarte in 2002 which was really special.
Q:
But did Jimmie really meet an old gold prospector called McCracken in a Panama
City bar in 1924 and fly with him to flat-topped mountain in Venezuela where
they extracted 60 pounds of gold from a riverbed in a few
days?
Karen heard the year was 1921. Anyway, she can't substantiate
that he did meet this prospector, but she can't say that he didn't. Jimmie did
embellish his stories throughout his life as he looked for investors willing to
finance his expeditions, because that left him free to seek out his El Dorado.
So part of it was marketing. But even if you strip away the legendary stories of
fighting with Lawrence of Arabia or meeting McCracken, you still have a man who
lived an extraordinarily adventurous life, who fully enjoyed what he did and was
a devoted father loved by his family.
He was very charismatic and women loved him. Most people know
him from the photos taken at the end of his life but he was very handsome when
he was young. There are many movie scripts out there but they've never been
made. Even when he was alive there were movie projects about his life.
Karen thinks there will be one someday. It's just such a great story and
Auyan-tepuy, the Gran Sabana and Angel Falls are such a great backdrop for a
movie.
Jimmie Angel died in Panama in 1956, aged 57, but in
July 1960 his widow, Marie and his two sons Jimmy and Rolan, with Gustavo Heny
and his friend Patricia Grant, flew over Angel Falls and scattered his ashes.
Grant wrote afterwards: "As we skimmed by the Falls the ashes floated
downward whipped by the wind and mixed in the spray, and thus our beloved Jimmie
returned to his waterfall."
ALL IN ALL A
LEGENDARY FIGURE THAT FOUND US A GREAT
WONDER
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