The Tragic Story of U-M Student and Polar Meteorologist Edward Israel

Washtenaw County has a connection to one of the most horrific and tragic tales in the annals of late 19th-century polar-exploration literature.

It's the tale of onetime U-M student Edward Israel, a brilliant mathematician adored by his professors, who was tapped for the ill-starred Lady Franklin Bay expedition.

He rode north along the western coast of Greenland on the Proteus, in whose hold lay 200 separate scientific instruments. None of them could measure why his dead body was the only one not cannibalized on Cape Sabine. Story.