The Ross Sea party did not know this. They spent the Antarctic winter of 1915–1916 laying depots as planned, in conditions that deteriorated catastrophically when a storm broke the Aurora’s ice mooring on May 6, 1915, and the ship drifted away with most of the party’s clothing and equipment still aboard. The men ashore were marooned with inadequate supplies on a continent that kills people who are better prepared than they were.
Mackintosh drove the men hard, harder than the conditions warranted, and the dogs died in the effort. Scurvy spread as their nutrition deteriorated. The chaplain, Arnold Patrick Spencer-Smith, had to be carried on a sledge during the depot-laying journeys because he could no longer walk. He died on March 8, 1916. The party buried him in the ice.
Mackintosh and another man, Victor Hayward, were rescued with the others and then, on May 8, 1916, made the decision to walk alone across 19 kilometers of sea ice to Cape Evans rather than wait any longer. A blizzard came up during the crossing. Neither man was seen again.
The survivors were rescued on January 10, 1917, when the Aurora, finally freed and repaired, returned for them. Shackleton was aboard the rescue ship. He had crossed half the world to get there.
Three men of the Ross Sea party died. Spencer-Smith, Mackintosh, and Hayward did not come home.
The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is sometimes described as a complete survival story, and it is, for the 28 men of the Weddell Sea party. For the expedition as a whole, the accounting is different. The headline about the Endurance is true and documented: all 28 who sailed on her survived. That truth coexists with the deaths of three men who were part of the same expedition, sailing under the same name, on the other side of the same continent.