Gerard Pahl of Edinburg, Texas lived in Kalamazoo for over three decades, but only recently learned about Edward Israel.
Born in Kalamazoo to parents who may have been the city’s first Jewish settlers, Israel was a young man when he took part in an ill-fated late 19th century expedition to the Arctic Circle. A gifted astronomer, Israel gathered information on the far north that is still an important part of the scientific record.
“Why is it that Edward was chosen? And two, did he die on the expedition or did he make it back and die in Kalamazoo?” Pahl asked "Why's That?"
Born in Kalamazoo, born to study the stars
To learn more about Edward Israel I met with Western Michigan University Regional History Curator Lynn Houghton at Mountain Home Cemetery, one of the oldest in Kalamazoo.
According to Houghton, Israel is buried here, right off West Main Street and across the road from Henderson Castle.
Houghton said Israel was born on July 1, 1859, the son of Mannes and Tilly Israel.
“They were involved with the organization and the creation of the first Jewish temple, which is still in operation, called Temple B’nai Israel. Mannes was a retailer. He owned a store on the corner of South Rose and West Main, now West Michigan, which was very popular.”
Edward Israel attended Kalamazoo public schools, eventually moving on to the University of Michigan in 1877.
According to Houghton, Israel’s pursuit of higher education was not a common goal for young people in Kalamazoo at the time.
“For a lot of students, not just in the village of Kalamazoo or, you know, throughout the county, probably eighth grade was sufficient. They went to eighth grade and that was enough.”
Israel went to U of M with one goal in mind: to study astronomy.
Andrew Rutledge is a historian of university history at U of M’s Bentley Historical Library. He said that at the age of 18, Israel was one of the youngest in the Freshman class, but he excelled at astronomy, eventually catching the eye of Mark Harrington, director of the university’s Detroit Observatory.
This was in Israel’s sophomore year, and Rutledge said it wasn’t long before he became Harrington’s most prized pupil.
“He was so impressed with Israel that not only were they reading above his level, but he was also helping work the telescopes, helping Harrington and his research," Rutledge said.
"Working together to continue the work that previous directors had done of trying to locate asteroids, building the weather service, the observatory.”
Rutledge said Israel studied both astronomy and meteorology alongside Harrington, quickly becoming not only the top of his class, but one of the top students at the entire university.
So, when the U.S. government reached out to the school in 1881 asking them to nominate a student to join an artic expedition, Harrington was quick to recommend Israel.
According to Rutledge, Israel would have to miss final exams and graduation in order to take part. The University’s Board of Regents gave him special permission to receive his diploma in absentia.
“This was the first time anybody was ever allowed to graduate without physically being present at commencement. We found no other cases where, you know, a sick note was accepted or any other special permission was given.”
However, unbeknownst to Israel, this was not the first time the U.S. had made this sort of request of the university.
Rutledge said a decade prior in 1871, the then-director of the observatory, James Craig Watson, had also nominated his prize pupil to take part in an arctic expedition.
This student, like Israel, eagerly accepted.
"He went to New York, met the commander of this expedition, this guy named Charles Francis Hall, and wrote back to Ann Arbor saying, 'This guy has no business leading an expedition to the Arctic. I'm not doing this, I quit,'" Rutledge said.
"It was a good decision because that expedition was a complete disaster. Somebody, we don't know who, poisoned Charles Francis Hall like two weeks into the voyage. The ship got crushed by ice and the survivors had to walk their way out of the Arctic."
Hall would die from the poisoning, later determined to be caused by arsenic. His crew was rescued, but only after drifting on an ice floe for six months.
Journey to the tip of the world
What was the point of the expedition?
Rutledge said it was part of the so-called “International Polar Year,” a multi-country effort to explore and study the far north.
“The US along with a bunch of European countries agreed that they would spend the early 1880s all sending expeditions to the Arctic to try and answer questions about weather patterns, currents, how close you could get to the North Pole."
Rutledge said the expedition also wanted to investigate a strange, seemingly counterintuitive, idea held by many at the time.
"There was a popular theory at this time that there was this great open body of water, this great polar sea right around the North Pole with warm water."
But Rutledge added that the U.S. government also had a more nationalistic motivation to fund the expedition.
“The US was like, ‘We're going to send a expedition that goes the farthest north, that stays the longest. We're going to beat the British, who currently have the record for being the closest to the North Pole.’”
The plan was to send a team of 25 men, led by Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, to Canada's northernmost island, Ellesmere Island, which sits just west of Greenland.
There, they would build a research station and record everything they could for the next two years.
Rutledge said most of the crew was made of U.S. military men, not researchers. The 22-year-old Israel was not only the expedition’s navigator, but also its lead researcher and instructor.
“He did the single largest amount of actual recording and helping setting up the instruments and making sure they were working, but he also had the responsibility of training the privates and other members of the expedition to monitor and use the instruments and record things,” Rutledge said.
"In many ways, I would argue that the vast majority of their weather and astronomical observations and records are all Edward Israel's doing, even if he was not the hand that put them there."
The expedition departed New York City in July of 1881, with enough supplies for about two years.
After stopping in Greenland to hire a doctor and two Inuit sled drivers, Rutledge said they made it to Franklin Bay by August without much issue.
Ellesmere Island is the tenth largest in the world, and it's anything but hospitable; it's covered by glaciers, ice shelves and frozen mountains.
To make things even worse, the island is a polar desert, receiving less than three inches of percipitation per year, making vegetation sparse.
Despite this, the men made it their home, establishing the Fort Conger research station, named after then-U.S. Senator Omar Conger of Michigan, who Rutledge said was a big sponsor of the expedition.
Rutledge did note one issue that occurred as the Proteus, which brought them to the island, departed a few weeks later.
"The second commander of the expedition, another army officer named Lieutenant Kislingbury decided at the last minute that he really didn't want to do this," Rutledge said.
"So he resigned, he told Greely basically, 'I quit, I can't do this' and tried to get to the shore, but the ship [that dropped them off] had already left. So he's literally standing on the shoreline outside Fort Conger watching the ship just disappear on the horizon."
This put him in an awkward position for the remainder of the expedition, having resigned his post but unable to leave.
Outside of Kislingbury's second guesses, everything was going according to plan, according to Rutledge. The men began taking notes, collecting plant and animal specimens, and gathering meteorological, tidal and other environmental measurements.
To top it all off, in the following spring, some of the crew sailed even farther north and claimed the “farthest north” record for the United States.
The team also disproved the warm water theory, discovering that the waters around the North Pole were indeed very, very cold.
From study to survival
In the summer of 1882, a planned resupply ship never came. But Rutledge said the expeditioners weren’t bothered.
“They’re just like, ‘Okay, well, they couldn't make it through this year. Fair enough. You know, we have more than enough supplies. We have more than enough research to do. Nothing's a problem here.’”
So, Rutledge said they continued, waiting for the next ship to come in the summer of 1883.
But, after weeks of waiting, they never saw a ship break the horizon.
This is when the gravity of their situation hit: dwindling supplies, an approaching winter, and no sign of rescue. Lieutenant Greely had a decision to make.
“We know that there are supplies 250 miles south of us because there are at least two ships that are, should have dropped them off there at this point. So, do we go and take advantage of the water that's still open here or do we try and eke out another winter? And what was the decision? The decision in October was, 'we go,'” Rutledge said.
According to Rutledge, Greely's plan was to load their boats with supplies and go south to Cape Sabine, the back-up location where the ships were meant to drop off supplies if they couldn’t reach Fort Conger.
“They filled them with some supplies, but they also decided because they ‘knew’ that there'd be all this food and supplies waiting for them at Cape Sabine, they would take their records and their instruments with them rather than more food.”
He added that a voyage like this would usually take about two weeks, but due to the severe weather conditions, it took 51 days.
"It goes wrong after three or four days when a blizzard and a storm comes through and just float them wildly off-course. There's snow and ice blowing through the air, so you can't see a thing," Rutledge said.
"Floating ice just starts appearing, because they thought it was still relatively open, which is one of the reasons they decided to sail. And so they find themselves having to pull their boats up onto floating icebergs almost every night just to stop them from being crushed."
Conditions were nightmarish, with crew members suffering from hypothermia and beginning to lose fingers to frostbite.
But Rutledge added that this trek was where Edward Israel’s skills became vital.
"Anytime there's any break in the cloud cover, Israel brings out a sextant and is trying to figure out where they are, how far they are either north, south, east, or west from where they're trying to go."
Miraculously, not a single member died before making it to Cape Sabine in late September.
However, when they investigated the drop-off point, the crew found only 40 days’ worth of rations.
“At this point they're staring at this tiny pile thinking, 'we have to survive somehow until next spring, next summer, six months away because that's the only time both ships are going to make to us.'”
Greely began strictly rationing what they had. That January, the first crew member died of scurvy and malnutrition.
Starvation, hypothermia and disease all ran rampant in the coming months. Many of the men wasted away, according to Rutledge, "getting worse by things like frostbite or gangrene that set in from any injuries they may have."
"Basically, they're just in this little camp that set up on Cape Sabine with these tents spending most of their time in their sleeping bags just to try and preserve energy, not wasting any calories," Rutledge said.
“Every day a couple members of the expedition would go down to the water and try and fish for these very tiny shrimp, almost microscopic, in the water that they would try and fish for something, some sort of food.”
Rutledge's article on the expedition goes even further into the men's desperation, adding that they would go so far as to eat boots, candlewax and even bird droppings in an attempt to survive.
For one member of the crew, Private Charles B. Henry, the experience drove him to thievery, getting caught a number of times stealing rations from others, according to Rutledge.
"After the second or third time he was caught literally red-handed, Greely told him, 'If you do this again, we're going to court-martial you and we're going to shoot you because you're endangering everybody else.' And sure enough a couple days later he was found again."
Confined to his sleeping bag, barely able to move, Greely held a court-martial trial, finding Henry guilty and ordering three army sergeants to execute him.
"The three of them walked this private out away from the camp, and to their dying day, they wouldn't say which one of the three of them pulled the trigger."
Only seven members of the team survived long enough to be rescued in June of 1884, with one of them dying soon after.
Edward Israel was not among the survivors. He succumbed to starvation on May 27, 1884, just a month before help arrived.
"According to the diaries of the men that have survived, he spent his last hours off giving up all of his possessions among the other surviving men," Rutledge said.
He added that Israel also asked that his mother and the families of the deceased receive any money he was owed.
“I think it speaks to sort of the testament of the best of what a human could be. As you said like this absolutely horrific, unimaginable starvation and sickness. When your final hours, you're thinking about not just the people around you, but the families of those that have already passed away and hoping that they were taken care of, not thinking about yourself.”
Israel’s body was later returned to Kalamazoo by train, according to Rutledge.
When it came through Ann Arbor, faculty members climbed aboard to accompany his remains.
Israel’s former mentor, Mark Harrington, was among them, and even more joined when Israel finally returned home.
“He continued on to Kalamazoo in a closed casket and not just his family but effectively the entire town met it at the train station and accompanied it as it was carried from there to the cemetery for burial.”
"In life, a child of God. In death, a hero."
That’s the epitaph on Israel’s grave marker at Mountain Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo.
It sits just off of West Main Street, near a historical marker that highlights Israel’s life.
Lynn Houghton said she hopes Israel’s story can inspire others.
“Maybe there's something I can do in my neighborhood, in my community, in my school that — maybe 3,000 people are not going to show up if I pass away or if something happens. But there's so many things that you can do in your community.”
According to U of M historian Andrew Rutledge, Israel’s legacy lives on at the university.
After the expedition, Lieutenant Greely donated 50 plant samples collected by Israel to U of M, adding that this became the basis for the university’s herbarium collection.
Rutledge added that, beyond these samples, the records Israel collected are still invaluable today.
“Particularly nowadays if you think about climate change and what that's doing to Arctic weather and global weather. Having these records really shows how things are changing, how the world is evolving 150 years on from this period, because this is the first sort of real baseline we have of Arctic weather.”
Question-asker Gerard Pahl said he was amazed that Israel’s name was not more well-known in Kalamazoo.
“At least I would hope be taught in the schools there. This man, you know, it's like walking on the moon in that day and age. So that's — that is really amazing.”
