A letter written by a Titanic passenger days before the ship sank has sold for a record-breaking £300,000 ($400,000) at auction in the UK.
Colonel Archibald Gracie’s letter was purchased by an anonymous buyer at Henry Aldridge and Son auction house in Wiltshire on Sunday, fetching a price five times higher than the £60,000 it was expected to bring.
The letter has been described as “prophetic,” as it records Col Gracie telling an acquaintance he would “await my journey’s end” before passing judgement on the “fine ship”.
Dated 10 April 1912, the day Col Gracie boarded the Titanic in Southampton and five days before it struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, the letter was written from his cabin C51. It was posted when the ship docked in Queenstown, Ireland, on 11 April 1912, and was also postmarked in London on 12 April.
The auctioneer who facilitated the sale said the letter had attracted the highest price of any correspondence written on board the Titanic.
Col Gracie was among the roughly 2,200 passengers and crew sailing to New York, of whom more than 1,500 died. His detailed account of the disaster became one of the best-known, later forming the basis of his book “The Truth About The Titanic.”
He survived the sinking by scrambling onto an overturned lifeboat in the icy waters, noting that more than half the men who had originally reached the lifeboat either died from exhaustion or cold.
Although he survived the disaster, Col Gracie’s health deteriorated due to hypothermia and physical injuries. He fell into a coma on 2 December 1912 and died two days later from complications linked to diabetes.
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