Mystery and History Collide: Titanic Passenger’s Chilling First-Day Letter Fetches Unbelievable $399,000 at Auction
Henry Aldridge & SonArchibald Gracie’s letter from April 10, 1912, which just sold for nearly $400,000 at auction.
As Henry Aldridge & Son explained, “Letters from survivors of Gracie’s profile rarely, if ever, come to market and this piece has never been offered for sale.”
Though the auction house estimated that the letter would sell for $80,000, it ended up selling for $399,000 — demonstrating how highly coveted Titanic artifacts often are.
But what happened to Archibald Gracie himself?
How Archibald Gracie Survived The Sinking Of The Titanic
When the Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, Archibald Gracie was asleep. The collision suddenly roused Gracie and, realizing that the ship’s engines stopped, he went to investigate.
“At the foot of the stairway were a number of men passengers, and I now for the first time discovered that others were aroused as well as myself, among them my friend, Clinch Smith, from whom I first learned that an iceberg had struck us,” Gracie wrote in The Truth About The Titanic, a book about his experience aboard the ship. “He opened his hand and showed me some ice, flat like my watch, coolly suggesting that I might take it home for a souvenir.”
Public Domain
A photo that may depict the iceberg that sank the Titanic, as seen on April 12, 1912, two days before the fatal collision.
Gracie spent much of the next few hours helping others get into lifeboats, including a group of women he had been chaperoning during the voyage. He was initially certain that other ships would hear the Titanic’s distress call and come to their rescue, a hope that faded quickly as the ship continued to slip into the North Atlantic. He ultimately found himself on the ship’s top deck as the Titanic sank.
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