'Prophetic' letter written by Titanic survivor sells for nearly $400,000 at auction

Archibald Gracie wrote a letter from aboard the Titanic five days before it sank. It has sold at auction for the equivalent of $399,000. Henry Aldridge & Son/via AP hide caption

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Henry Aldridge & Son/via AP

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 on Saturday in Devizes, England.

Andrew Aldridge of Henry Aldridge & Son, the auction house that oversaw the sale of the letter, told NPR he believed the note was so highly prized largely because of Gracie's "incredible" sentence about withholding judgment before the ship's journey ended.

Aldridge, an auctioneer who specializes in the valuation of Titanic memorabilia, added that the sale was testament to the public's continued interest in the famous shipwreck.

"The stories of those men, women and children are told through the memorabilia, and their memories are kept alive through those items," Aldridge said in an email.

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.

A letter written by one of the Titanic's most well-known survivors from onboard the ship days before it sank has sold for 300,000 pounds ($399,000) at auction. Henry Aldridge & Son/via AP hide caption

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Henry Aldridge & Son/via AP

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.