For sale: macabre relics of Titanic disaster
By Tim McLaughlin Fri Jun 22, 3:38 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hand-written accounts of the Titanic disaster's aftermath go on sale next week, including log entries describing how bodies of passengers who drowned were buried at sea with 50-pound (23-kg) weights attached.
A Christie's auction of memorabilia from various ocean liners is expected to draw up to $1 million.
Thursday's sale in New York will feature haunting reminders of the RMS Titanic, which sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg. Its deck chairs are not in the auction.
Gregg Dietrich, a Christie's vice president and maritime specialist, acknowledged the sale will have a grim side because some items detail the disaster's recovery operations.
"24 unidentified bodies committed to the deep. The Rev. Canon Hind officiating at burial service," can be read in pencil notations in a deck log from the MacKay-Bennett, the second rescue ship on the scene. "Attached 50-lb weight to each."
The deck log from the MacKay-Bennett is expected to bring $30,000 to $50,000, Christie's estimates.
Dietrich said interest in the Titanic persists nearly a century after it sank, partly because of the "grandiose proclamations" about its design and engineering.
"And it was the first disaster that was communicated worldwide by radio," Dietrich said.
The supposedly unsinkable ship sank quickly, leaving behind 360 bodies that were recovered. Of more than 2,200 people on board, around 700 survived.
The auction also will include an eight-page hand-written account of the disaster by survivor Laurie M. Cribb, a New Jersey native whose father perished.
A teenager at the time, Cribb's account details the moment the ship hit the iceberg, the chaotic evacuation, her separation from her father and watching the Titanic's lights go out.
"Most terrible shrieks and groans from the helpless and doomed passengers who were left on the wreck of the great ship," Cribb wrote.