When first-class passenger Col. Archibald Gracie boarded the Titanic in Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, he drafted a letter to a friend.
“It is a fine ship,” he wrote, “but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgment on her.”
Five days later, the “unsinkable” ship struck an iceberg and sank in the frigid waters off Newfoundland, killing some 1,500 of the vessel’s roughly 2,200 passengers.
Now, Gracie’s eerily prescient letter has sold at auction to an anonymous bidder for a record-breaking $399,000 — nearly five times its expected price. The auction took place in Devizes, England.
In 2013, the auction house also sold a violin believed to have been played by bandleader Wallace Hartley as the ship sank.
The instrument sold for over $1.6 million, setting a record for Titanic-related artifacts at the time.
Col. Archibald Gracie, a wealthy American real estate investor, managed to survive the sinking by climbing onto an overturned collapsible lifeboat with around a dozen other men, according to the auction house.
He went on to write The Truth About the Titanic, a personal account of how the disaster unfolded. According to Gracie, around half the men who reached the lifeboat died from exhaustion or extreme cold.
Despite surviving the tragedy, Gracie died less than eight months later due to health issues exacerbated by hypothermia and physical injuries sustained from the shipwreck, according to the auction house.
The letter left the ship when it made a stop in Queenstown, Ireland, before embarking across the Atlantic. The seller’s great-uncle was an acquaintance of Gracie’s, who received the letter at the Waldorf Hotel in London on April 12, 1912 — three days before the ship sank.
