What the survival of the 28 men of the Weddell Sea party shows is that in a specific set of circumstances, a specific group of people, making a specific series of decisions with the tools and time available to them, achieved an outcome that the circumstances had not made inevitable. That is enough. That is, in fact, the most honest thing that can be said about any survival.
The wreck of the Endurance sits at 3,008 meters at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, intact, legible, upright. It is there because the ice that crushed it carried it north and eventually sank it. The 28 men who sailed on it are not there because they refused, through twenty-two months of increasingly extreme circumstances, to stop doing what was necessary to get home.
The ship went down. The men came back. Those two facts, held together, are the whole story.
## The Banjo That Stayed
When Shackleton stood on the ice beside the abandoned Endurance and told his men that each person could keep two pounds of personal belongings, he demonstrated the seriousness of the restriction by throwing his own gold watch and cigarette case onto the ice. He kept three things: a page from the Book of Job, a gold medallion the Queen had given him, and Leonard Hussey’s banjo.
The banjo was not two pounds. Hussey later said it weighed considerably more. Shackleton kept it anyway, overriding his own weight restriction, and when he was later asked about the decision he said, in various formulations, that music was essential — not a comfort, not a nicety, but essential — to the psychological survival of the group. The banjo was the source of that music. Therefore the banjo stayed.