Titanic survivor's letter sells for record £300,000 at auction
A rare letter written by a survivor of the Titanic disaster has fetched a record-breaking £300,000 (P22 million) at an auction.
Penned by Colonel Archibald Gracie, a first-class passenger who famously survived the tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912, the letter was sold by Henry Aldridge and Son, a renowned auction house in Devizes, Wiltshire.
Originally expected to fetch around £60,000 (P4.4 million), the letter stunned auctioneers and bidders alike by soaring to the £300,000 (P22 million) mark during Saturday's sale.
Col. Gracie survived the sinking after scrambling onto an overturned lifeboat, but his health never recovered, and he died eight months later. He documented his harrowing experience in his book The Truth About the Titanic.
This particular letter card is dated April 10, 1912—the day he boarded the ship. It was postmarked from Queenstown (now Cobh, Ireland) at 3:45 p.m. on April 11 and later stamped in London on April 12. It offers a rare and personal glimpse into his thoughts before the tragedy.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said that the letter, believed to be the only example from Col. Gracie in existence from on board the Titanic, was written over four sides to the seller's great-uncle, an acquaintance of Col. Gracie.
"It is a fine ship but I shall await my journeys end before I pass judgment on her," it read.
"The Oceanic is like an old friend and while she does not possess the elaborate style and varied amusement of this big ship, still her seaworthy qualities and yacht-like appearance make me miss her."
According to the auction website, Col. Gracie boarded the Titanic at Southampton on April 10, 1912. He stayed in a First-Class cabin, C51. He helped women traveling alone during the trip and read books from the ship's library.
The night the Titanic sank, Col. Gracie went to bed prematurely because he planned to wake up early the next day to play squash. However, he was suddenly woken up when the ship hit an iceberg just before midnight. He immediately started helping women and children get into lifeboats.
When the ship's back end sank underwater, Gracie managed to grab onto an overturned lifeboat with a group of other men. Sadly, many of them died during the night from exhaustion and the cold, quietly slipping into the water.
Gracie was rescued and brought to New York City aboard the ship Carpathia at sunrise. Soon after, he began writing about his experience in his book The Truth about the Titanic, published in 1913.
However, the cold and injuries he suffered badly affected his health. Later that year, on December 2, Gracie fell into a coma and died two days later, mainly due to complications from diabetes.
Meanwhile, detailed 3D scans of the Titanic shipwreck were released earlier in April, providing new insights into what happened during its final hours.
These scans, a "digital twin" of the Titanic, were used in a new documentary called Titanic: The Digital Resurrection, produced by National Geographic and Atlantic Productions.
The scans, created by the deep-sea mapping company Magellan, revealed that the ship broke into two pieces upon sinking. One important discovery was that some of the ship's boilers were dented inward, indicating they were still operational as the Titanic sank. An open valve was also spotted, suggesting that steam continued to flow, and the engineers remained at their posts to maintain the ship's electricity, as survivors had previously reported.
A computer simulation based on the scans suggested that small tears—about the size of A4 paper—in the ship's hull caused it to flood and sink.
The Titanic famously sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, causing the deaths of around 1,500 people, even though it was once believed to be "unsinkable."
