A letter written on board the by one of the most famous survivors from the ill-fated ship’s maiden voyage in the for £300,000 ($399,390) on Saturday.
The lettercard was penned by first-class passenger Archibald Gracie IV to the seller’s great-uncle on April 10, 1912, the day the Titanic set sail from Southampton to .
“It is a fine ship but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgment on her,” wrote Gracie, before the vessel struck an iceberg off Newfoundland four days later and sank with loss of around 1,500 lives.
Gracie’s letter, believed to be the only one he wrote aboard the Titanic, was purchased by a private collector from the for five times the initial estimate 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.”
Titanic: who was Archibald Gracie?
Gracie, whose father had been a Confederate officer during the and whose great-grandfather had built Gracie Mansion, the current official residence of the mayor of New York City, in 1799, was returning to New York after traveling to Europe earlier in 1912.
The 54-year-old was a keen amateur historian and had published a book about the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, in which his father had fought, a year earlier.
When the Titanic struck the iceberg and began to sink, Gracie had jumped into the ocean and scrambled onto an overturned lifeboat, before being rescued by other passengers and being taken to the RMS Carpathia, which picked up the survivors the next morning.
Upon his return to New York, he wrote about his experience 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 succumbed to complications from diabetes in December 1912 the first adult Titanic survivor to die after the event.
Edited by: Kieran Burke
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