This decision is remembered partly because it is charming and partly because it was correct. The Saturday evening concerts on the ice — Hussey playing, the men singing — are recorded in the diaries as genuine bright spots in the experience of the drift. They provided something the food and the shelter and the organized activities did not provide, which was beauty. Antarctic winter on a drifting ice floe is not a naturally beautiful experience. The music made it briefly more habitable.
Hussey played on Elephant Island as well, in the cramped and dark and reeking hut where 22 men waited through four months of Antarctic winter. The banjo’s function there was, if anything, more important than on the ice drift, because the circumstances were narrower and the psychological threat more acute. The Saturday spirit toast, the banjo, the card games, the Encyclopaedia Britannica readings — these were not recreation in the sense that implies something extra, something beyond necessity. They were necessity in a form that the conventional survival calculus tends to omit.
Shackleton understood this. He had led expeditions before and had seen what happened to morale when the interior life of a group was neglected in favor of purely physical management. The banjo was two pounds he could not afford and could not afford not to keep.
Hussey was, by the accounts of the other crew members, not a physically imposing or particularly dominant personality. He was the smallest man on the expedition and a meteorologist by training. His contribution to the survival of the Endurance party was measured in banjo performances and Saturday songs. It was, in the precise accounting of what was necessary and what was not, as necessary as anything else that was kept when the ice forced the reckoning.