Shackletons Cabin (2023) Movie Script
1
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,
fag 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 torture
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
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,
fag 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 torture
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