By Samuel Eugene
A letter written aboard the Titanic by one of the ship’s most famous survivors has been sold at auction in the United Kingdom for £300,000 ($399,390) on Saturday.
The letter card was penned by first-class passenger Archibald Gracie IV to the seller’s great-uncle on 10 April 1912, the day the Titanic set sail from Southampton to New York.In the letter, Gracie wrote, “It is a fine ship, but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgement on her.”
The letter was written four days before the ship struck an iceberg and sank, resulting in one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, claiming the lives of 1,500 passengers and crew members.
Gracie’s letter, believed to be the only one he wrote aboard the Titanic, was purchased by a private collector from the United States for five times its initial estimated price of £60,000 after going under the hammer at Henry Aldridge & Son auction house in the southern English county of Wiltshire.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge described it as an “exceptional museum-grade piece.”
Gracie, whose father had served as a Confederate officer during the American Civil War and whose great-grandfather had built Gracie Mansion — now the official residence of the Mayor of New York City — in 1799, was returning to New York after travelling to Europe earlier in 1912.
The 54-year-old was an avid amateur historian who had published a book the previous year about his father’s role in the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga
When the Titanic struck the iceberg and began to founder, Gracie leapt into the water and climbed onto an overturned lifeboat before being rescued by other passengers and eventually transferred to the RMS Carpathia, which picked up survivors the following morning.
After returning to New York, he documented his experiences in The Truth About the Titanic, which auctioneer Aldridge described as one of the most detailed accounts of the disaster.
Gracie never fully recovered from the hypothermia he suffered in the freezing water and died from complications related to diabetes in December 1912, just months after the sinking.
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