THE JIMMIE ANGEL STORY
ANGEL'S EXPLORATIONS 1933-1937
left, the "biggest mistake of his life." He was off to South
America to find the Scotsman's gold. What he found
instead was a 3,212-foot tall waterfall. Most
encyclopedias and other Angel websites still have the
inaccurate date of the discovery recorded. He returned
again with Case Pomeroy in 1935, but everything till then
was preparation for the great exploration of 1937. While
Lowell Thomas announced to the world how the
exploration party was lost in the Venezuelan wilderness,
Angel, with his second wife, Marie, famed woodsman
Gustavo Heny, and Miguel Delgado, survived 11
harrowing days on Mount Auyantepui. Most believed
they had perished forever. This 1937 exploration is the
focus of the first ERC manuscript nearing completion.
Angel's airplane, El Rio Caroni, remained stranded on
the tepui after a perfect landing that was interrupted by
a six-foot nosedive into the bog. The airplane was
removed posthumously and restored in Maracay. Today
it is a Venezuelan national monument.
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James Crawford Angel. Riding abreast the same plunging wind compelling 16th century Spanish, Germans, and Portuguese,
Jimmie Angel fiercely injected into this primordial forest a legacy of extraordinary, unprecedented exploration. His was a legacy
that, like the rainforest canopy, itself, was born upon lower tiers and expanded outward into unfathomable dimensions - a
four-century drama with constant adventure that never allayed, never curtailed. To Angel, whose pulse emblazoned the torch of
our arriving story, The 1937 Exploration of Guiana, "the tepuis (are) where hell touches heaven." Angel, born to a
Scottish-American father and Cherokee-Choctaw mother near Springfield, Missouri in 1899, died in David, Panama in 1956; but it's
what he accomplished in between that defies belief. Jimmie Angel touched many different worlds and many lives. His life was so
fulfilled that his adventures, many attest, are myths. But Angel seldom needed a reason to fabricate tales, even though when he
had one, he was very adept at it. In the event , researching Angel becomes a task not unlike chipping way at the polar ice caps
with an ice pick to see what's beneath. Remarkably, after all the ice is removed, after we've chiseled through layers of skepticism,
there is a core of truth to his every pretense.
Before he was 20 years old, this American flyer had been a bothersome, pro-active player in the birth of flight and the lives of its
daredevil pioneers. At 14, inspired by his idol, Weldon Cooke, he designed a workable glider and successfully soared over
Eugene, Oregon, and, by 15, had already completed his first mechanized solo flight. At 16, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air
Force at Montreal using falsified birth documents, went overseas, tested upcoming designs for SPADs, Nieuports, and Sopwiths,
and reveled in target practice of German hot-air spy balloons AND German Fokker D-VII's. Shortly thereafter, following his 19th
birthday, Angel, under orders from Lawrence and Fiesel on a detached mission to Arabia, laid waste to railroads near Turkish
Herat. Then he navigated the west-African coastline to Cape Town where he joined in the November 11 grand party. His next
mission was China.
Whereas Angel impacted a worldly assortment of 20th-century events, his early years have never be accurately conveyed. He
would confront death repeatedly to help others in distress. For Jimmie Angel, the world wasn't always very nice, but it was always
his to choose." When I die," he once said, "I think the Lord will give me a charter to find lost souls." Ultimately, one cannot help
but wonder if, in 56 years of living and 6 months dying, Angel's incredible adventures are possible. Today's irrefutable and
arriving evidence suggests many of these larger-than-life tales actually happened. It was when the reckless, headstrong
American flyer turned 20 that his life changed dramatically and forever. The incident responsible for that change we refer to today
as MacCracken's Gold. It's Venezuela's modern-day complement to El Dorado. This is a story with two episodes, each episode
comprised of two men, both explorers, both seekers of gold. Henceforth, the golden light of his obsession fell upon, and was
illuminated by, a 3,212-foot-high waterfall, the world's tallest. It is today named Angel Falls. His name is thus memorialized in a
tombstone nearly a mile high, from which descends one of the world's most extraordinary natural wonders, Angel Falls.
