At some point in the accumulation of these numbers, the question shifts from “how” — which is documented in considerable detail — to “why” — which is not reducible to numbers at all.
The 28 men who sailed on the Endurance were not, in the aggregate, unusually heroic people. They were a cross-section of men available for an Antarctic expedition in 1914: experienced mariners, scientists, craftsmen, and several people who were on the expedition essentially by accident. Blackborow was a stowaway. Greenstreet had joined with 24 hours’ notice. Bakewell was an American passing as Canadian to simplify the crew paperwork. James, the physicist, had joined almost accidentally through a last-minute vacancy.
They did not all like each other. They did not all trust their commander. They had grievances and feuds and moments of despair that the expedition accounts record honestly. They were human beings.
And all 28 of them, through the accumulated combination of decisions made and unmade, luck that broke in their direction and luck that didn’t, technical skill deployed at critical moments, and the sheer structural fact that they refused to stop trying until they were either home or dead — all 28 of them got home.
The Ross Sea party’s three deaths are not a counterweight to this, exactly. They are a reminder that the same Antarctic environment, the same era of polar exploration, the same broad enterprise did not spare everyone. The Endurance was not protected by some special grace. The 28 who sailed on her survived because of what they did, and what Pardo did, and what the mathematics of the Southern Ocean allowed, and because the ice that crushed their ship did not also take any of their lives on the way to doing it.