If you want to find a 3000 year old ancient Egyptian
relic, you could, you know, search the endless,
heavily guarded marble corridors of the Louvre
in Paris. Right. Or the British Museum. Yeah.
Or the massive halls of the British Museum. Or
you could look inside a cardboard box marked
miscellaneous sitting in the back room of a small
volunteer run stone building in an isolated Scottish
fishing village. It is. Quite the contrast. I
mean, I'm actually looking at some historical
maritime maps of the Orkney Islands right now
just to sort of set the scene for the listener.
The sheer geographical isolation we are talking
about here is it's striking. It really is. You
have this small coastal town of Stromness surrounded
by the rough waters of the North Sea and the
Atlantic. And yet the local museum there holds
an inventory that spans from ancient African
civilizations. all the way to like highly experimental
Arctic exploration gear. Which is just wild to
think about. And that's why today's deep dive
is entirely focused on this one location. We
are taking a single Wikipedia article about the
Stromniss Museum and uncovering how this one,
I mean, seemingly niche independent institution
acts as a secret portal to the entire world's
history. Yeah, it's a perfect example of how
interconnected everything is. Exactly. And for
you listening right now, if you are looking for
that sudden aha moment, you know, that feeling
of seeing how global history connects without
getting bogged down in an overwhelming sea of
dates and textbook chapters. This is exactly
the story you want to hear. Because this one
building neatly organizes thousands of years
of human endeavor under a single roof. It really
does. Okay, let's untack this. Where exactly
does the story of the Stromness Museum actually
begin? Well... To understand the museum, you
really have to understand what was happening
to the town astronomers in the mid 19th century.
Right. The 1850s brought this explosive population
boom to the Orkney Islands. And that growth wasn't
driven by industry in the traditional sense,
like like coal or steel. It was fish. Right.
Yeah. It was driven entirely by the herring fishing
industry. The waters around Orkney were incredibly
rich and the sheer volume of fish being pulled
from the sea brought massive, unprecedented wealth
into this remote community. And obviously, when
a town suddenly gets an influx of wealth and
people, the local infrastructure has to adapt.
Precisely. The growth was so rapid that by 1856,
Stromness officially became what was known in
Scotland as a police burg. A police burg? That
sounds... what exactly does that mean? So essentially,
the town had grown too large and too complex
to be managed by a distant county authority.
Becoming a police burg meant they had the legal
right to establish their own local municipal
government. Ah, okay. Yeah, to handle things
like paving, lighting, cleansing, and, well,
actual law enforcement. Which means they suddenly
needed a place to put that new government. Right.
They needed a headquarters. So the newly formed
local borough council commissioned a town hall.
It was completed in 1858, and it was designed
to reflect their new civic pride, you know? Yeah.
They built it in this very imposing neoclassical
style, constructed entirely out of ashlerstone.
Let's pause on that for a second. Ashler Stone
isn't just like a pile of rough rock stacked
together, is it? No, not at all. Ashler refers
to stone that has been carefully cut and worked
until it is perfectly square and smooth. Oh.
Yeah. When you build a facade out of Ashler Stone,
you are intentionally trying to create a formal,
permanent, and highly structured look. It was,
frankly, a massive architectural flex for a fishing
town. A huge flex. Definitely. In fact, it's
such a significant piece of historic architecture
that today it's a category B listed building,
meaning it's officially recognized and protected
on a national level in Scotland. So they build
this grand town hall for the new government.
But the local council didn't actually get to
keep the building to themselves, did they? They
ended up in a bit of a roommate situation right
from the start. They did, yeah. You see, the
Orkney Natural History Society had actually been
founded two decades earlier, back in 1837. Oh,
so they were already around. Exactly. By a group
of passionate local scholars and collectors.
So when this grand new town hall was finished
in 1858, an arrangement was made. The Burke Council
took over the ground floor to handle all the
municipal paperwork and local law enforcement.
While the Natural History Society moved their
growing museum into the first floor upstairs.
It sounds a bit like a modern tech startup sharing
a co -working space with the local city council.
It's actually a great way to put it. You've got
the bureaucratic machine operating downstairs
and upstairs you have this passionate slightly
obsessive group of people just hoarding natural
history specimens and the museum the startup
in this scenario, they ultimately won the real
estate battle. They completely outlasted their
landlords. Yeah. Fast forward to the 1920s and
the Burke Council ended up relocating to a different
facility. Leaving the whole place empty. Right.
That allowed the Orchee Natural History Society
to acquire ownership of the entire building.
They expanded their exhibits downwards, taking
over the old government spaces and hosted a grand
reopening in February 1931. And that was a pretty
big deal, right? Oh, absolutely. It was officiated
by Alfred Bakie, the Lord Lieutenant of Orkney
and Shetland. Which means he was the British
monarch's personal representative in the region.
That gives the whole operation a very serious
stamp of royal approval. It really does. And
the museum is still operating out of that exact
same building today, right? Yes, it is. But its
operational structure is what makes it so unique
now. Today, it is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated
Organization, or SCIO. But more importantly,
it is managed entirely by a volunteer committee.
Just volunteers? Yeah. If we connect this to
the bigger picture, the fact that this is a volunteer
enterprise completely shifts how we usually think
about historical preservation. We have been conditioned
to assume that world -class knowledge preservation
requires a massive, faceless, steep bureaucracy.
Right, with millions of dollars in centralized
funding. Exactly. But the Stromness Museum proves
that history can be driven by a passionate, local,
grassroots community. This isn't a state mandate.
It is a labor of intense local pride. And that
local pride makes a lot of sense when you consider
what was actually coming into their harbor, because
the same sea that brought the herring and the
wealth to build that town hall also brought global
traffic. Oh, absolutely. Stromas wasn't just
a secluded fishing village. It was a major maritime
crossroads, which brings us to the actual artifacts
inside the building. This is exactly where the
deeply local narrative expands into a global
one. The ethnographic and exploration collections
held in Stromness rival what you would expect
to see in a major national capital. Let's talk
about Captain James Cook. His third voyage, the
one famous for exploring the Pacific, actually
has ties to this small Scottish town. It does,
yeah. When Cook's ships, the Resolution and the
Discovery, were finally returning home to Britain
in 1780, they actually landed in Stromness. And
artifacts from that specific voyage are sitting
in this local museum today. Which is incredible.
It is. They also have ethnographic items collected
by prominent Orcadians who traveled the world,
like William Balfour -Bakey, who explored the
Niger River in Africa, and Jack Renton, who had
this unbelievable journey living in the Solomon
Islands in the South Pacific. The breadth of
the collection is just staggering, but the true
crown jewel of their exploration history is tied
to the Arctic. Right, the Arctic expeditions.
Yeah. During the 19th century, there was a massive,
highly publicized effort by the British to map
the extreme north and navigate the northwest
passage. A huge deal at the time. Oh, the space
race of its day. The museum holds items related
to the famous Orcadian explorer John Ray, who
actually discovered the final portion of that
passage. They also have a fascinating collection
of artifacts belonging to the indigenous peoples
of northern Canada, which were brought back by
these same explorers. And the survival gear they
have on display is mind -blowing. The sources
highlight something called a halkit boat. Ah,
yes. An incredibly rare piece of engineering.
The museum has one of only two halkit boats known
to still exist anywhere in the world. For you
listening, imagine a 19th century precursor to
an inflatable survival raft. but highly experimental.
Very. It was designed to be worn like a heavy,
waterproof cloak or carried like a specialized
umbrella while trekking across the frozen Canadian
tundra. Then, when the explorer reached a freezing
river, they would inflate the cloak using a bellows,
turning it into a one -man rubber boat. It's
bizarre. It is bizarre, it is genius, and it's
sitting in stromness. They even have an authentic
Arctic medal awarded to the legendary and ultimately
doomed explorer, John Frank - Yeah, the Franklin
Expedition. I have to ask the obvious question
here, though. Captain Cook was sailing for the
British Admiralty. John Franklin was a national
hero. Wouldn't the Crown demand that all of these
incredibly valuable artifacts go straight into
the vaults of the British Museum in London? Like,
how did a small town council manage to legally
capture and keep all this world history? Well,
it wasn't a matter of legal maneuvering, really.
It was a matter of practical geography and human
nature. Look at where Orkney is positioned. In
the 19th century, Stromnus was the literal last
stop of civilization before ships sailed into
the terrifying unknown of the Arctic ice. It
was the edge of the map. Exactly. It was the
ultimate frontier outpost. If you were commanding
an expedition, Stromnus was the last place you
could take on fresh water. And crucially, the
last place you could hire experienced Orcadian
ice navigators who actually knew how to survive
in freezing waters. That makes total sense. And...
If you were lucky enough to survive the Arctic,
Stromnus was the very first piece of solid civilized
ground you stepped onto when you returned. So
the explorers formed personal relationships with
the town. They did. They stayed in local lodging
houses. They traded. They drank in the local
pubs. Many of these artifacts weren't official
government property. They were personal souvenirs.
Oh, I see. Yeah. An explorer might use an ethnographic
carving from the South Pacific or an Inuit artifact
from the Arctic to pay a local family for a month
of lodging. Over decades, those individual items
trickled out of local living rooms and were donated
straight to the Orkney Natural History Society.
So the geography made Orkney the perfect jumping
off point for explorers. But that exact same
geography, being this vital strategic harbor
at the top of the British Isles, also made it
a massive focal point when global warfare broke
out a few decades later. Yes, the narrative of
Stromness shifts very suddenly here from the
peaceful, well, peaceful but dangerous scientific
exploration of the 19th century to the violent
mechanized global conflicts of the 20th century.
Right in Orkney's backyard. The museum has an
entire collection dedicated to local naval history,
specifically centered around Scapa Flow. And
for context, Scapa Flow is a vast natural harbor
surrounded by the Orkney Islands. It is sheltered.
deep and large enough to hold an entire armada.
Wow. Because of that, it became the primary base
for the British Grand Fleet during both the First
and Second World Wars. And the Stromness Museum
holds artifacts pulled directly from that water.
They have items from sunken Royal Navy ships,
but also artifacts from the scuttled German fleet.
That's a huge piece of history. It is. After
World War One, 74 ships of the German high seas
fleet were interned at Scapa Flow, believing
that the British were about to seize the ships
permanently, the German commander ordered his
own men to intentionally sink the entire fleet
in a single day. The wreckage is still down there.
It is a profound historical event to have situated
just a few miles from your town hall. The sources
mention one specific artifact that caught my
eye. It's an instrument recovered from the dreadnought
battleship, HMS Vanguard, which tragically blew
up while anchored at Scapa Flow in 1917 due to
an accidental magazine explosion. Yes, a terrible
tragedy. The artifact is called a Dumaresque.
Now, a Dumaresque sounds like a very delicate,
highly sophisticated French dessert. It does
sound like that. But it is actually a vital piece
of naval technology, isn't it? It is entirely
mechanical, yes. A Dumaresque was an analog calculating
instrument. Right. It's essentially an early
mechanical targeting computer. Imagine a highly
complex brass slide rule covered in dials and
moving parts. Yeah, that's a good way to picture.
It was designed to calculate the geometry between
your moving battleship and an enemy's moving
battleship so you could figure out exactly where
to aim your massive naval guns to hit a target
miles away. So what does this all mean? When
you take a piece of rusted targeting equipment
off a sunken dreadnought and put it in a local
museum, I mean, does having pieces of these massive
warships change how we process the sheer terrifying
scale of global naval warfare? I think it alters
our perspective completely. When we read about
the world wars in traditional history books,
the numbers are so large that they become abstract.
Yeah, just statistics. Exactly. Hundreds of ships.
Thousands of sailors, vast oceans, the human
brain struggles to process that level of industrial
conflict. It just becomes a list of numbers.
Yeah. But when you walk into a quiet stone building
in Stromness and you look at an intricate, oxidized
brass dial from the HMS Vanguard, it gets it
real. It strips away the abstraction. It grounds
those massive conflicts into a very visceral,
tangible reality. The rusted metal of world -altering
wars was pulled straight from the local bay.
For the people of Orkney, global history isn't
something that happened over there on a distant
continent. It is deeply, physically local memory.
You can almost feel the weight of the steel and
smell the oil. It's heavy. But here's the twist.
As fascinating as the naval battles and the Arctic
survival gear are, the museum's most shocking
secrets don't actually involve ships at all.
No, they involve the ground beneath our feet
and the archives behind the exhibition doors.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Let's
look at their natural history collection. Remember,
the Orkney Natural History Society was founded
way back in 1837. Right, they've been at this
a while. They have been collecting biological
specimens and geology for nearly two centuries.
The foundational items are exactly what you'd
expect from a Victorian -era society. Thousands
of taxidermied birds, extensive fossil collections,
and rare mollusks. And many of these were painstakingly
gathered by dedicated local figures. You have
individuals like Charles Clouston, a local clergyman
and meteorologist who systematically recorded
early weather data and collected geology. Oh,
sure. Or Robert Rendell. a local poet and amateur
contrologist who obsessively catalogued the shells
and mollusks of the Orkney shores. They even
hold a specimen of homosteus milleri, which is
a massive, heavily armored fish fossil from the
Devonian period, famously discovered by the pioneering
Scottish geologist Hugh Miller. A very impressive
piece. So far, this is a very standard, highly
respectable 19th century natural history society.
But let's fast forward to the modern era. The
year is 2016. Someone is conducting a routine
review of the museum's Scarabray collection.
Scarabray being the incredibly well -preserved
stone age settlement in Orkney, which just for
context actually predates the Egyptian pyramids.
Right. So a researcher is going through cardboard
storage boxes from Scarabray and inside one of
them they find a 5 ,000 year old Neolithic whalebone
figurine. Just sitting there. Just sitting there.
It was literally in what the staff described
as the last box they checked. A completely priceless
artifact of early human history that had long
been considered completely lost. And if that
isn't wild enough, let's jump to 2020. Researchers
from the National Museum of Scotland are examining
the Stromas collection and they suddenly identify
two Egyptian phants, shabtis. Phants is this
ancient crushed quartz paste that gets fired
with a glaze. Usually a brilliant turquoise color,
right? Yeah, exactly. And a shabti is a small
funerary figure that ancient Egyptians buried
with their dead, believing the figure would magically
come alive and do manual labor for the deceased
in the afterlife. And researchers found two of
these ancient Egyptian figures dating all the
way back to between 1145 and 986 BC. In Orkney.
Sitting in a small museum in the Scottish islands,
it is the equivalent of cleaning out your attic,
moving aside a box of your old tax documents,
and finding a literal dinosaur bone underneath
it. It really is. But I'm struggling to understand
something here. You mentioned this society has
been running since 1837. How on earth does a
museum simply lose a priceless 5 ,000 -year -old
Neolithic whalebone carving or 3 ,000 -year -old
Egyptian shabtis for an entire century? Weren't
they keeping records? Well, this raises an important
question, and it addresses one of the most fundamental
misunderstandings about how historical archives
actually function. The general public tends to
view museums as, you know, pristine static display
cases. Yeah, like everything is perfectly cataloged.
Right. You assume that what is clearly labeled
behind the glass is the entirety of the institution's
knowledge. But the reality of archival science
is incredibly messy. How messy are we talking?
Think about the sheer volume of material. For
over a century and a half, local citizens, returning
sailors, board explorers, and wealthy travelers
were constantly dropping off items at the museum's
doorstep. Just a constant influx. It was a relentless
tsunami of artifacts. Now, remember that this
is a local volunteer -run society. They did not
have an army of specialized PhDs or modern database
software to properly identify, cross -reference,
and catalog every single rock, bone, and carving
that came through the door. They just had to
triage everything. Exactly. Things got boxed
up quickly to save space. They got labeled vaguely.
An incredibly rare 3 ,000 -year -old Egyptian
shabti might simply be recorded in a dusty ledger
as small carved green stone donated by Mr. Smith,
1892. Oh, man. And then that box gets put on
a high shelf in a back room. It can sit in the
dark for generations, perfectly safe, but completely
unrecognized. Just waiting. It just waits there
until the right researcher, someone with a specific
highly specialized expertise, to look at that
green stone and instantly recognize its true
historical weight. finally opens that exact box.
So the museum isn't just preserving history from
the elements, it's actively hiding history from
itself until the time is right. It's a beautiful
way to phrase it. Which perfectly wraps up exactly
why we wanted to take this deep dive today. Think
about the incredible sprawling journey we just
took for you listening, all by examining the
contents of one single building. It's been quite
a trip. We started with an 1850s herring boom
that forced a small Scottish town to build an
ashler stone town hall. We saw that civic building
become a roommate to a startup natural history
society. We tracked Captain Cook's return voyage
from the Pacific. We examined experimental inflatable
lifeboats designed for Arctic survival. And we
felt the heavy metallic ghosts of sunken dreadnoughts
from the global conflicts of the 20th century.
All of that existing alongside lost ancient Egyptian
funerary figures and 5 ,000 year old Neolithic
carvings. All of it contained protected and managed
by a dedicated committee of local volunteers
in Stromness, Scotland. It's just unbelievable.
It serves as a profound reminder for you as you
listen to this. True learning and world class
history aren't just confined to the giant, heavily
funded national institutions and major capitals.
Knowledge is everywhere. It really is. It is
woven directly into the fabric of small towns,
and it is often preserved purely by the sheer,
stubborn dedication of local volunteers who care
deeply about their community's place in the wider
world. The history of the world isn't always
kept in an impenetrable vault. Sometimes it's
kept in the room right above the Old Town Council.
And that leaves us with a final lingering thought
for you to ponder long after we wrap up today.
If a tiny volunteer -run local museum in the
Orkney Islands has ancient Egyptian artifacts
and 5 ,000 -year -old Neolithic carvings that
were just sitting safely in an unmarked cardboard
box until a few years ago, what unrecognized
world -altering history is sitting in the attics,
basements, or local historical societies of your
own hometown right now, just waiting for someone
to finally open that last box?