Shackletons Cabin (2023)

[bunniefuu]

William

William

William

He gets a bit scared sometimes

William, this is William

William is our workshop mascot

He's been living on the pillar

drill for the last 15 years,

so you can see he's slightly

dusty

William actually makes sure

that we all go home with ten fingers

and two eyes

My real title is

Object Conservator,

something I genuinely like

We all rot, we all change

We try to manage deterioration

That's really the real essence

of it

Apply that and that actually

strengthens timber then,

because at the moment it will just

crumble under your chisel

We started in 1999

This was again a mad idea

Why would you do this at the edge

of Europe, as far away

from your clients

as you can ever be?

But we established ourselves as

one of the leading workshops

in the country to preserve

and conserve Irish heritage

So we've worked really on anything

from Mary's kitchen chair

to the gates of

Kilmainham Gaol here

The variety is rather large

You never know what's going

to happen

That's the great thing

Isn't it?

Yeah He agrees

We've noticed over the last ten

or so years a huge interest

in Shackleton and his story

And on that basis, we've been

turning towards creating a dedicated

Shackleton museum here in Athy

We have an opportunity now

to acquire a very special artefact

The family over in Norway have sent

us across some images they took

a number of years ago,

and this appears to show

what they describe as Shackleton's

cabin in the garden

of their property

It's actually the cabin

in which Shackleton died

from Shackleton's last ship

called the Quest

If this is the true cabin

in which he died in,

it's like the Holy Grail of

Antarctic artefacts

Yes

Now, the reason why Shackleton's

so important to us here in Athy

is that he was born only seven miles

from this museum in 1874,

in a place called Kilkea

He's often described as a British

explorer, but actually

he was very much an Irish man

His family were here since

the 1720s

If we could have the cabin

which he actually breathed

his last breaths,

it'd be extraordinary for us

Yeah, I'm speechless

Shackleton on his way out,

f*g in his hand, waving his hat,

big smile on his face

He was 47

The Quest expedition,

which was his last and his fourth

expedition, is not well known

So hopefully it will help

people to understand

what the men went through

It's actually up in northern Norway,

north of the Arctic Circle

So the logistics of getting

it back to Ireland are going

to be extraordinarily challenging

What we're after is to find as many

details as possible to make

absolutely sure that we're dealing

with the original cabin

As with most subject matters,

only when you start diving into it,

do you actually realise

how deep it is

Sir Ernest

Shackleton, explorer and poet,

died on an Antarctic voyage

5,000 miles from home

His ship, the Quest,

drove on into the polar ice

On 5th January 1922,

Shackleton died in Grytviken,

which is in South Georgia

Eventually, when the boat returned,

as usual with all the expeditions,

they owed a bit of money

The boat had to be sold

The boat went back to Norway

where it came from,

and on the shipyard they took

this cabin off the deck

This is the shipyard where

my grand grandfather helped

One of the men working in the

shipyard said, "I'll have that,"

and used it as a garden shed

for 90 years

And it was passed down in the family

until eventually Ulf Bakke passed

it on to Athy

You're happy that the cabin

is going to a good home?

Good

So it's quite a story

Are you going to be sorry to see

the cabin go from your garden?

Yes, I will be crying

Yes, crying

Oh, no

OK

The cabin in which

Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton

died has been shipped to Ireland

It'll be restored in Galway

before being taken to his birthplace

for permanent exhibition

Wow

It's great to have her finally here

And it all seems very healthy

Now we can start the work

So the other half, that half

was occupied by Frank Wild,

his second in command, and then

Shackleton was on this side

Everybody would expect him to die

in a crevasse or being eaten

by strange animals, or drowning

But he just died in his bed

And pretty much the procedure

with objects coming in

are very similar

So the first thing we do

is to investigate, just by looking

I mean, just go in there

and spend many hours in there

and to really look at every part

How is it constructed,

make lots of sketches

A lot of our clients have a very

deep and intimate connection

with their objects

I don't get personally connected

Sometimes you might get

carried away

Luckily, I always try to hold

myself back and just say,

"Listen, it's just a wooden box"

Especially on this subject matter,

it's heavily romanticised

We spend many, many, many

weeks in the research -

base everything I see and find

on evidence

Two inches there

It's not often that I can actually

stand inside an object

I'm really looking forward

to thisjourney

The quest of the Quest

We were very lucky that we had

a very good image of the interior

of Shackleton's cabin

in the Scott Polar Research

Institute in Cambridge

This photo was definitely

stage set for this purpose

I don't think his bed linen

would be that immaculately white

So I think this must have been at

the beginning of the journey,

or very early on

It's a rectangular space

The bunk on the left

And straight ahead,

you have a little cabinet

with an elliptical mirror,

and on the right-hand wall

is a bookcase

Shackleton was a keen reader

and he encouraged all his crew

as well to read

Underneath it is a wash stand

and there's another very small

little glass support,

I would call it, next to his bed

So I know that the boards,

the backboards, are 160mm,

so I can transfer those measurements

and, in the end, measure everything

within the cabin and that will help

us then to actually rebuild

these pieces to scale and make sure

it looks pretty much identical

to the image

So let's make it 32 inches

Without that photograph, we wouldn't

even have a journey, I think

It would be just a garden shed

and I would not be involved

in inventing something

that could have been in there

Now, the depth of it Erm

Often you find something

and that gives you a lead

and you just keep on going

It's a bit like a crime scene

investigation, you could call it

So as part of the research,

we recently found this new source

Just by pure coincidence, I found

this amazing blog which followed

the Quest expedition

Miraculously, some of these images

appeared

that I had never seen before,

and cos there's only a very small

amount of images available

John Quiller Rowett,

the man who actually financed

the Quest expedition,

visited the boat in Southampton

in the shipyard,

and his visit was documented

with these photographs

Really interesting and very,

very important documents

And to have them is just fantastic

I was so surprised that

I contacted the man behind it

It's actually the grandson of

John Quiller Rowett, Jan Chojecki

The fact that after 100 years

this has now come to light

is very exciting

So your grandfather knew

Shackleton from Dulwich College

They weren't in the same year

They were two years different

So Shackleton was two years

senior to my grandfather

So they weren't best buddies,

you know, that kind of thing

But they walked the same

route to school

Rolling forward to 1920,

which is when Shackleton

really had the urge

to get away again

So he planned an expedition

to the Arctic to go

in summer of 1921,

Northern Hemisphere,

Come the beginning of May,

he still hadn't

The funding, yeah

You know?

And really getting too late to go

north in that summer

He approached my grandfather

and said, "Can you help?"

My grandfather was, by that time,

a wealthy, established businessman

in wine and spirits

June 2nd, there's a dinner

at The Savoy, and on this menu card

penguins are drawn,

which says they're going south

Ah

Because it's too late to go north

And obviously,

he has sufficient funds as well,

because it was, I mean,

a very large amount of money

Yeah The equivalent

these days is about five million

And it was a big commitment

The late decision

to cancel the Arctic,

go to the Antarctic, but also

puts pressure on the timing

Because you've got to get ready

in three months to go south

The Quest, which is by this time

being fitted for the north,

has got to be refitted to go south

As you said, they were under

enormous time pressure

to get this all together

And it's quite evident as well

in the techniques they used,

how they jointed the materials

I don't think it ever got

properly ocean tested

I think the excitement, adventure,

that's what they signed up for

He was lecturing twice daily

on his old exploits

and it was all getting

a bit of a bore

Shackleton was very keen

to get away

So this is the lock

of Shackleton's cabin

Pretty much standard door locks

Every time he grabbed

this door handle

I'm sure he was relieved,

having a bit of sleep

The story was told to me when

I collected this cabin in Norway

The schoolkids would hear the story

about Shackleton and the connection

with Amundsen, and they would

just go along and paint this

You could say it's not the original

paint, but it definitely helped

reducing the amount of moisture

that would go into the timbers,

so therefore there

would be less chance of rot

This is just a very small paint

flake, but I'm sure

it's very representative of all

the paint that was in this area

Some people say this is destructive,

but I think on this object

it's a responsible thing

Because we only have black and white

photographs,

it will tell us quite

a lot about its pasts

The first layer is kind

of a greyish, light greyish layer,

with lots of black pigment

particles

There's some orange particles

in there

Hmm, how did they get in there?

We go up, there's one more layer

which is kind of a light grey,

and then there's a very thin

blue layer

And then the top is the white,

which I would say

is the modern white

the kids from the school

actually applied

So the original colour was just

a kind of a lightish grey

Wow That's interesting

Also the other layer

like the light blue,

we have to think about that

This cabin was used as a garden shed

for another 90 years afterwards

They painted it light blue as well

Those paint layers are kind

of an evidence of that

We do that quite a lot on objects

to actually help us to understand

what happened to these objects

and how they were treated

We didn't have many vinyls at home,

but it's amazing, that picture,

obviously, I must have looked

at it a lot, very strong

in my memory

The words are actually

etched in my brain

And even though it's 40 years ago,

I think I can remember it

It's called The Race to the South

Pole by Scott and Amundsen

So Scott was the Englishman

and Amundsen was the Norwegian

Scott embraced a more modern

way with motorised sleds

Amundsen being a Norwegian totally

embraced the Inuit technology

So he had a dog sled, skis,

his outfits were made

out of sealskin

Scott obviously had a lot of

technical problems, and when Scott

then arrived at the South Pole,

he saw the Norwegian flag

Amundsen was there before Scott

I think about four weeks earlier

Amundsen is known as the first

man on the South Pole

Scott and his crew

never made it back

So it's actually quite dramatic

I would say for an eight-year-old

it would be quite touching,

I would say

It's a lot about death

and suffering

But again, they all have this goal

of getting to a place

One man who achieved his goals

in the modern era

is Sir Ranulph Fiennes

He's regarded as one of the greatest

living explorers

And one of his many accomplishments

was that he became the first man

to cross the Antarctic continent

unsupported

I brought some images

because I have some very specific

questions and I would really

appreciate your opinion on this

OK

So this is the cabin which they just

put on the deck because the Quest

was relatively small

So Frank Wild was next-door

So you have the partitioning

wall in the middle

So when I measured, the position

of that wall was to the millimetre

accurately in the centre

of this cabin

It's quite, I thought, significant

that everything was built roughly

except for the placing of the wall,

which was ultra accurate,

Right

He had the most remarkable ability

to keep worrying about other people

when he himself was suffering

dreadfully

Even if he was called the boss,

there was a lot of equality

there and respect

So the Endurance

was his third expedition,

the one before the Quest

By that time

the South Pole was reached

So the next big step would

have been to cross

the entire Antarctic continent

Which was a massive undertaking

The Endurance got caught

in the pack ice,

which was particularly bad

that year

And they were then sitting on an

ice floe for over ten months

I mean, you can't even imagine

what life would be

Shackleton was an amazingly

strong character

In terms of leading men under

miserable conditions, brilliant

What they would give him

was an almost automatic reaction

to what you would give

the man back that would totally

Yeah, the boss

And that developed slowly

It wasn't just because one

person called him the boss

They all began, after the sinking of

the ship, to realise that his real

test he was succeeding in

Eventually the ice floe did break up

and they managed with lifeboats

to just about get to Elephant

Island, which is a tiny

little heap of rocks

He selected five people,

among them Tom Crean,

that would come with him with

one boat with James Caird

to try to get help

The only option was to sail

to South Georgia

It's about 800 nautical miles

One of the roughest oceans

in the world

The real t*rture

that he went through,

even a few hours in that

small boat,

in those conditions trying

to survive

The journey took 17 days

and they made it

but they landed on the wrong side

of the island

Then they had to climb

three glaciers

I mean, if you think about that,

no equipment or very little -

just a rope and a couple of nails

in their shoes

And then the mad dash,

made it across and made it

to the whaling station

in Grytviken

By then, the whole world thought

already they were all dead and lost

Eventually, after a long ordeal,

managed to save the rest

of the crew

The story goes that they never, ever

doubted that Shackleton

actually would come back

to save them

You could see when he came back

to the country

that the people loved him

as a hero

Generally, I think everybody agrees

that his achievements,

being the first or having done

something that is unique

were not that great

But on any of his four expeditions,

none of his men died

His polar contemporary,

Sir Raymond Priestley, commented,

"For scientific leadership,

give me Scott;

"for swift and efficient travel,

Amundsen;

"but when you are in a hopeless

situation,

"when there seems to be no

way out,

"get on your knees and pray

for Shackleton"

I'm taking this tar paper off

because that was put on

somewhere in the '80s

And that will also give us a good

idea of how healthy the roof is,

because this is really the only

unknown part of the cabin,

which we haven't investigated yet

Oh, wow

That's very interesting

The planking is actually corked,

so it's a raw cotton they hammer

into that groove

And they do that with a lot of

force, and sometimes they do that

two or three times and put these

layers on top

of it and compress them really hard

And that way you make the seam

waterproof

and it looks like the original

caulking,

that same rope would have

been on the crest

Most likely

This is still the exact same timber

as the rest of the cabinets

Just ordinary pine, bog-standard

structural timbers

they would have had in the shipyard

Delighted, because I was afraid that

there might be some rot there,

but it's pretty much perfect

So I'm trying to make the ellipse

mirror for the cabinet

I mean, you can do this on a

computer as well, but in objects

conservation, I think it's good

to go through the techniques

of how it was done originally

I would say Aristotle did this

2,000 years ago

These are leftover shelves

from an historic library

that was built in 1903

So I think it's a perfect

material to recycle

Authentication

Well, it's closer to the real one

I have this keen interest

in materials,

and wood is one of those

fascinating materials

This is the door for the

small cabinet

that's made out of recycled

material

The idea behind it is not to fake

it, but to have something

that is close to the original

This was an Edwardian wardrobe,

but it was all solid mahogany

Whenever I see a skip anywhere

in the country,

I generally stop and go for it

I don't know what people

throw away,

but maybe they just don't

realise what it is

But if you know your materials

and your art history a bit,

I think you can recognise

things quite well

So there was always something

visible on the ceiling,

some kind of pattern, and it looks

like an embossed wallpaper,

which is really interesting

So I'm just trying to find out more

because that pattern

seems very, very strange

The cabin was built really quickly,

they had that very little time,

so why would you spend your time

putting a wallpaper on the ceiling?

Maybe it was on purpose,

maybe it was just random

Maybe it was Shackleton's favourite

wallpaper I don't know

Having read a lot about Shackleton,

there's a lot of speculation

of who he is,

what kind of man he was,

and I have the great opportunity

to actually meet

Alexandra Shackleton,

Ernest Shackleton's granddaughter

Hopefully, be able to understand

a bit more about, who was he?

Yeah, exactly - that's

that's really the big question

This is one of my favourite

photographs of my grandfather

I think you can tell from his

photograph he wrote poetry

At one stage, he set out the

qualities regarded

for polar explorer -

Yeah

Optimism, patience, idealism,

and, finally, he put courage

He thought everyone had courage

Yeah

He entered the merchant Navy

as a 16-year-old,

in the days of sailing ships

And when do you think his interest

for the polar regions started?

My grandfather realised that though

he loved the merchant marine,

it wasn't really going to be

enough for him

He'd heard about Scott's expedition,

Discovery Expedition

Another reason, the oldest reason in

the world, he met my grandmother

and want to make his name

so that her father

would think he's a suitable

son-in-law

So he applied and got the post,

he was Third Officer on Discovery

So Discovery was followed by the

Nimrod Expedition,

which was the second expedition

in 1907,

which was led by Shackleton himself

Yes, but he did not get what

he most wanted -

he did not get to the Pole

We reached the

point within 97 geographical miles

of the South Pole

The only thing that stopped us from

reaching the actual point

was the lack of 50 lb of food

Possibly could have got there,

but they'd all have died there

And his decision to turn back

is regarded as one of

the great decisions

of polar history

We're all defined by our priorities

It's quite clear from then,

his priority was his men

He tried to settle down -

he got married,

became Secretary of the Royal

Scottish Geographical Society

It was quite a stultified

institution in those days

I don't think it would have

suited him

The early Shackleton once said

to his little sister,

"You cannot think what it is

like to tread where no-one

"has trodden before"

I mean, Shackleton had several

amazing women around him,

including his wife, Emily

She pretty much kept

the home ship afloat

I think she really loved the fact

that he was doing successful things

that he really liked doing

She must have enjoyed the

reflected glory from that

But, when he was living in the home

and then in his office in London

trying to get an expedition going,

and when things weren't going well,

he took to the bottle

Yeah

and became quite unpleasant

in domestic life

I do not think he was a saint

or a hero,

which some people tend to think

their relatives are

But I do think he was

a very great man

He definitely

couldn't take inactivity for long,

because he had what she called

the wonder fire,

the wanderlust,

the call of the wild

"My love, I'll be back soon

"As soon as it's finished, my love,

that will be the last one"

"No more"

Some people would say, you shouldn't

go on when you've got a family

It's selfish

In September 1921, he left from

St Katharine Docks

and the records say that the

shores of the Thames

were thronged with people

waving him goodbye

Of course, nobody knew that

was the last goodbye

After each of his expeditions,

he told my grandmother he

wouldn't go again

But eventually she realised

that was not so

And I believe she wrote in her

diary once,

"I realise you cannot cage

an eagle in a barnyard"

It was always this perpetual move

towards the next big project,

going somewhere else where

he was the happiest

So I don't think he ever wanted

a civilian life

The amount of objects left

from the Quest Expedition

are very, very limited

One of them, of course,

is the cabin

Another really significant

one is the Crow's Nest

This barrel still exists in the

All Hallows Church in London

Jayne Pierce is the Curator at

the South Georgia Museum

and will hopefully help me

to understand a bit

more about the boss himself

So here it is

Oh, wow!

The barrel

Isn't it fab?

Fantastic

Do you think that this barrel is

as special for being used

as a crow's nest on a ship,

or is it just a barrel?

I think it's just a bog-standard

Just a barrel?

barrel, because you can see

there's a plug there

The plug was here to fill it

Holding liquid?

Yes, exactly

OK

And also, you can see the grooves

here that would have had

the lid set in

Right

So it definitely had a lid,

and, of course, it would have been

quite difficult to use

Interesting

So it's just a barrel that would

have been adapted, OK

It would have been very unpleasant

to sit in this, I would say

At that height, I mean,

just the movement,

imagine this is 25 metres up

in the air

On a very unstable boat

Swaying

Ooh

Seriously strong stomach

On the journey south,

the Quest was hit by many

really bad storms

Late decision - cancel the Arctic,

go to the Antarctic

As soon as it got out into rough

water, which, you know,

wasn't what an Arctic sealer was

designed to do

It was - that's a coast hugger

The weight of the propeller

shifting around

threw the crankshaft

out of alignment

If the whole thing's not working,

that's what started happening

pretty quickly in the Bay of Biscay

And that led to all the problems

and that led to the stress

that Shackleton piled on himself

And they eventually travelled to

Rio de Janeiro to do some repairs,

and they ended up being there

for about four weeks

And so their whole schedule

was knocked off course

When they got to Rio to fix the boat

for the third time,

George Hubert Wilkins, who was

the naturalist on the boat,

he was sent to ahead to South

Georgia to start doing

some specimen collecting

and research

Wilkins, I know, was disappointed

with the lack of interest

that he felt the expedition

had in the science

You think it might have not been

well communicated, or you think?

I don't think the leadership's

heart was in it

And there was a little bit of

OK

By the time they got to Rio,

I think Shackleton

had got the sniff of the Antarctic

and wanted to beeline it

and so sent the scientists on ahead

They didn't really want to

go to South Georgia

because South Georgia had been

surveyed quite a lot

In fact, in Wilkins' diary,

he says, "it's been done"

Shackleton really wanted to get

to South Georgia

If he got a couple of people

down there,

they're going to have to

follow them

The Quest Expedition never got

really a huge amount of exposure

His work schedule was nothing

compared with the bravado

of what he had planned previously

It wasn't going to be that

No

They were going to sail the

southern seas,

but it's not going to the pole

Even after the Endurance, where they

were on the verge of death,

a lot of them actually

signed up again

Among them, of course, was Frank

Wild, his second in command,

who actually was his next door

neighbour in the cabin

Hussey, the famous man

with his banjo

Then went Macklin, his doctor

By this point,

he wasn't very well

He was a heavy drinker,

heavy smoker

It was well known

that he was suffering

He was drinking more and smoking

pretty well nonstop

So I don't think it was a great

preparation for, you know,

an Antarctic excursion

And he was desperate to get south

It was almost as if he was

holding on

So my research on the wallpaper,

I contacted Lincrusta

They're in business for over 100

years, and they're doing

very luxurious wall coverings

Ooh

Very nice

Michael from Lancaster found this

wall with the wallpaper

somewhere in London, and he made

this rubber mould

So he took a kind of

an imprint of it

To have a mould to make wallpaper,

of course,

is something very, very special

And until this project, I had never

heard of it, that that even exists

To even find the wallpaper

was pure luck

This whole project, I think,

is one of those magic projects

where everything comes together

All the decision making on objects

needs to be based on

rock solid foundations of

ethical consideration

I could change it in a way

that this object

becomes something different

And that's something I think is

quite serious because that way,

you actually change history and

the integrity of the object

Is that off the book case?

Well, to the photograph, this was

just nailed together

So we're going to do the same thing

So nothing fancy

Got everything positioned

so very soon we can place them all

to the millimetre accurate

where they used to be

So now it's just a matter of

getting the furniture all finished

Because we're dealing with objects

that represent us and our culture,

they're really worthy of

every consideration

Then next to the bunk, they would

have had the little side table

with the three holes in it,

with the water carafe

and the funny seed inside

Some people say it's a spud

because of his Irish background,

but I think that's very thick

to actually come up

with that kind of idea

The first sheet of anaglypta

Wow Turned out perfect

And it's nice and flexible as well

We're going to make about ten of

those, which should be sufficient

to cover the entire ceiling

in the cabin

In perspective, this would be up

on the wall and you would be looking

into the cabin, and that looks

pretty much like the bookcase

I have an oil lamp here

They had electricity on the ship

This was, I assume, a backup

And this is roughly the same age

but of course,

it was not the original one

And it's sitting on a gimbal

It's very, very likely that

this was the light

he used to write in his diary,

including his last entry

The Scott Polar Research Institute

is an absolutely amazing collection

of very significant and important

documents and objects

And I'm here to meet Naomi Bonham,

the institute's archivist

So, having read through his diaries,

what kind of character

do you think he was?

His diaries are all very different,

so you get different sides to him

depending on which diary

you would be reading

The Quest Diary is, his final diary,

is much more of a personal diary

Just looking at it, you can tell

it's not the sort of sledging diary

that he would carry around

with him in his pocket

This is one to be written

Yes

Possibly at the end of each day

Yes

So you think it's more reflective

OK

All explorers used pencil

because the inks can run

And there is, of course, only

Yes

On the 1st of January, we've got,

"Rest and calm after the storm"

The last days of 1920 had not

been good weather-wise for them

And it mentions Christmas Day in

the raging gale seemed out of place

1st of January 1922

The year has begun kindly for us

I dared not venture to hope

that today would be as it was

Anxiety has been probing deeply

into me

for until the end of the year,

things have gone awry

At 1pm, we passed our first berg

The old familiar sight aroused in me

memories that

the strenuous years had deadened

Ah, me The years that have gone

since in the pride of young manhood

I first went forth to the fight

I grow old and tired,

but must always lead on

He might have known

that he wasn't healthy,

that this might be his last journey

Out of almost despair

he kind of runs off

after maybe reflecting on his life,

"I haven't really achieved any major

things" like his colleagues did

Certainly not in the best of health,

he would have known that,

but still wanting to carry on

Going back to the Antarctic in a way

is perhaps like going home,

which in a way becomes more poignant

considering it's literally

his last few days

3rd of January, 1922

Another beautiful day

Fortune seems to attend us

this new year

There are two points

in the adventure of the diver -

one, when a beggar

he prepares to plunge,

one, when a prince,

he rises with his pearl

And then January the 5th,

an empty page here

Alexandra Shackleton will be coming

and she has never seen

the cabin like this

So quite exciting to see

what she thinks about it

By the time they got to

the Grytviken, the whaling station,

it was the 4th of January

Everyone was super happy

Shackleton came out of

this dark cloud and was joyous

In the middle of the night

Shackleton was restless,

he couldn't sleep and

he called in Macklin, the surgeon,

about 2, 2:30am

And then he suffered

a huge heart attack and died

in his cabin on the Quest

There we are

So this one is

the ship's log for the Quest

Wow

"3am Sir Ernest Shackleton

died suddenly of heart failure

"Drs Macklin and McElroy

in attendance"

Yes

Hmm

So they took his body off the ship

They then left and went on to

Antarctica to try and carry out

what was remaining

of the expedition

And then the idea was that

the body was then going

to be taken back to Britain

Meanwhile, news had finally

travelled back to the UK,

back to his wife in London

Emily decided

he ought to lie in South Georgia,

the scene of his greatest triumphs

and the place that

mattered so much to him

So they had a lovely small service

in the church at Grytviken

with lots of whalers present

His grave is very different

from the norm

He is pointing south towards

Antarctica, to where it's thought

his soul and his heart

truly wanted to be

I think it's always important as

well to have both feet on the ground

and just say, listen,

it's just a wooden box

That's what it will always be

But in the last 20 years,

this was definitely, I think,

physically, mentally,

the most intense project

Normally, as I said, I never get

personally attached to objects,

but with the cabin,

I definitely had that

I think it's something

that touches me emotionally

So that cabin, I think, is quite

a bit more than just a garden shed

To give John Quiller Rowett

a lot more credit is, I think,

quite important, because without

It wouldn't have happened

He would be very disappointed

with the way that it wrapped up

the way it did, because

it didn't execute It didn't finish

They didn't manage to do much

They did some geological work,

some meteorological work

They were hit by bad storms again

And so they made the decision

to just head back to South Georgia

And they of course didn't know

that he was by then buried

But I'm sure the crew was,

I would say, maybe quite happy?

Yes

at his grave Yeah

They decided to then make a cairn

as a memorial to Shackleton

And it still stands today

on South Georgia

on a place called Hope Point

Ernest Shackleton's death has been

described as marking the end

of what's called the heroic age

of Antarctic exploration

Back at that time,

the polar era was over

Shackleton was definitely

the last accepted hero

Wow Gosh

And the bunk

Just to help you, there's

the famous image which was taken

from exactly the position you're in

Amazing It looks wonderful

Oh, this is so

beautifully done, Sven

I think he would have been

astonished and amused

at the enormous amount of interest

there is 100 years later

Yeah

I'm sure you're aware what

actually happened on the night

Hussey had his banjo with him,

so Hussey actually, on the evening

of his death, sat actually there

and played a lullaby

I didn't know that

But what I always wondered is

when Shackleton was lying

in this cabin and looking up,

at the moment when he passed

what his last thoughts

would have been

It's absolutely evocative

of how it was

just a little over a century

since my grandfather died in it

The night Shackleton died, as

I came off watch, passing his cabin,

he called out to me

He said, "Huss, I can't sleep

"Play me some of the old tunes, will

you? They always help me to sleep"

So I played him a lullaby

How lovely

Yes

You know what his last words were?

Last entry in his diary?

4th of January, 1922

At last, after 16 days

of turmoil and anxiety,

on a peaceful sun shining day,

we came to anchor in Grytviken

A wonderful evening

In the darkening twilight

I saw a lone star hover,

gemlike, above the bay