Titanic Survivor's Letter Fetches Unprecedented Price at UK Auction

(MENAFN) A letter penned by a Titanic passenger just days before the tragic sinking has fetched an unprecedented £300,000 ($400,000) at a UK auction.

Written by Colonel Archibald Gracie, the letter was acquired by an undisclosed buyer through Henry Aldridge and Son, an auction house in Wiltshire, on Sunday. The final price came in at five times the pre-sale estimate of £60,000.

The correspondence has been labeled "prophetic" due to Gracie’s comment to a friend that he would “await my journey’s end” before offering his opinion on the “fine ship.”

Dated 10 April 1912—the day Gracie boarded the Titanic in Southampton—the letter was written five days before the ship struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic.

Col Gracie was among roughly 2,200 people aboard the Titanic as it sailed toward New York. The disaster claimed the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew.

A first-class traveler, Gracie composed the letter from cabin C51. It was mailed when the ship stopped in Queenstown, Ireland, on 11 April 1912, and later received a London postmark on 12 April.

According to the auctioneer, this letter has commanded the highest price ever paid for any correspondence written during the Titanic’s voyage.

Gracie is also known for providing one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the disaster.

He later published The Truth about the Titanic, chronicling his harrowing ordeal aboard the ill-fated vessel.

In his memoir, he described how he survived by climbing onto an overturned lifeboat in the freezing sea.

He noted that over half the men who initially made it to that lifeboat eventually perished from exposure or exhaustion.

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