It’s the most famous knock on the door in polar history. On 20 May 1916, Ernest Shackleton banged on the door of the Manager’s Villa in Stromness whaling station on South Georgia and announced to the surprised occupant that he had lost his ship.
Together with Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, he had just marched across the unmapped frozen interior of the island, following their astonishing 1,300 km (800 mile) voyage from Elephant Island in the tiny James Caird boat, where the crew of his ship Endurance was stranded.
In 2022, the wreck of Endurance was located under the ice of the Weddell Sea but the fate of the historic and long-abandoned villa in Stromness has remained in the balance. Now, the South Georgia Heritage Trust is stepping in to save it for future generations. We talked to its Chief Executive Alison Neil to find out more.
Saving an abandoned history
The old whaling stations of South Georgia are a reminder of one of the darkest periods of man’s relationship with nature. In 1904, the island became the birthplace of industrial whaling in the Antarctic and Subantarctic, when the first whaling station was established in Grytviken. Over the next six decades around 175,250 whales were killed in the island’s waters and had their blubber rendered into barrels of oil. It’s a terrible harvest now remembered in the Commensalis memorial, erected on Grytviken’s flensing plan, where the whales were hauled out of the water to be butchered.
Whaling was in full swing in 1916 when Shackleton, Worsley and Crean arrived at Stromness in ragged clothes after their great odyssey. But Stromness was abandoned in the 1960s when the industry in South Georgia fell into terminal decline, and its buildings have been exposed to the harshest weather that this island can throw at them ever since. Without urgent intervention, the Manager’s Villa and the rich history it represents has been on the cusp of disappearing forever.
‘There are some very rotten timbers—especially the lower foundation timbers—and it could collapse at any point,’ Neil told me. The SGHT and their US-affiliate Friends of South Georgia Island have spent the last two years fundraising to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Extreme building conservation
Saving the Manager’s Villa isn’t a standard building repair job. In exactly the same way that today’s visitors can only arrive by sea, the specialist conservation team has to bring all their equipment and personnel in by charter vessel from the Falklands Islands – which then serves as their home throughout the project.
‘Our team has to be living offshore to minimise the environmental impact of what they’re doing,’ said Neil, who explained this is also for their own protection. ‘They’ll go ashore every day, do the work and then head back to the boat.’ This unusual commute is due to the entire condition of the station, which is deemed a very unsafe environment.
Grytviken, where cruise passengers can pay their respects at Shackleton’s grave as well and visit the SGHT-run South Georgia Museum underwent a massive environmental clean up 20 years ago to make it safe for visitors. Stromness and the island’s other whaling stations have yet to receive a similar treatment. While the beach at Stromness throngs with seals and penguins, the station itself is a rusting industrial site. Its buildings are riddled with asbestos and the strong winds can easily whip up loose debris like flying metal sheets.
As a result, it’s illegal to approach closer than 200 metres to the buildings, even when zodiac cruising. Because of this, SGHT required the permission of the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands to carry out their preservation work. And while ashore, the team has to wear protective suits and masks the entire time.
‘They’ll be removing the asbestos from the building, and also one nearby so that it can be used as a kind of a safe house if the weather gets rough,’ said Neil, nodding to South Georgia’s famously unpredictable weather. ‘There will be a lot of clean up going on as well as making sure that that building is stabilised for the future.’
Most of Stromness’s buildings were originally constructed in Norway and sent flat-packed to the island to be constructed. For this reason, the Trust is using specialist Norwegian carpenters who were involved in an earlier restoration project on the island. ‘It’s quite a sensitive job,’ Neil told me. ‘They need to lift the building up to be able to replace some of these very rotten timbers, but the heritage skills they have that are still in use in Norway today will ensure an authentic version of the Villa is saved for future generations.’
Creating a digital replica
With the general condition of the station at Stromness set to prevent tourists walking up and knocking on the door in the same manner as Shackleton, SGHT has come up with an innovative plan that means people will still be able to visit – no matter where they are in the world.
After the conservations have secured the building for the future, the trust will make a detailed laser scan of the villa to create a digital replica that can be accessed anywhere in the world. It’s a concept inspired in part by the work of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust’s digital recreation of Captain Scott’s Discovery Hut in 2024. Archival research will allow visitors to experience the hut as it was when Shackleton walked through its door in 1916. To sharpen the skills, the team have been testing and refining their cutting-edge scanning techniques at Weald & Downland Living Museum, a centre in Sussex specially in conserving historic buildings and traditional crafts – even down to operating their equipment while dressed in full protective gear.
Neil says that the creation of a digital replica of the Shackleton villa is a great opportunity for the SGHT—and visitors to South Georgia—to be thinking about the impact of tourism on the island, including hose who want to follow in Shackleton’s footsteps.
‘In the future, do we really want more and more people coming to the island, or do we want to think about bringing South Georgia to the people who can’t visit, so we can still conserve it responsibly and not impact on its fragile environment in the same way? By going down the digital replica route, we can really get the best of both worlds, with this opportunity to recreate that villa as it would have been in 1916 for the whole world to enjoy. This is going to ripple through all our conservation work in the future, from heritage preservation to environmental research.’
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