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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 this...journey.
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.