Possible Clues:

• Understaffed situation
• Club for paleontology majors?
• Not many hands on ghost ship?
• The staff down to the bare bones presumably working on the archaeological dig
• Limited staff [1, 11-12]
• 27s knew about minimum staff
• Minimal manpower
• It's the minimum you'd expect of a workforce who didn't save their own skins working their fingers to the bone
• Bare-bones staff
• Manpower minimum