A rare Titanic first class menu was sold for just over R$500,000 on Saturday (11) during an auction of objects removed from the wreckage of the most famous ship in history. Heavily stained with water, with some of the letters partially obliterated, the menu likely ended up in the North Atlantic “for a time” when the Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, according to British auction house Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd.
The recovered menu details the first dinner on board after the Titanic set sail from Queenstown, Belfast and reveals the high standard cuisine that the ship’s first class passengers would have experienced.
Dinner options that night on April 11 included oysters, filet mignon with radish cream and desserts such as apricot pie and pudding.
There appear to be no other examples of the first-class menu for that particular night, according to the auction house, which consulted museums with Titanic collections and major collectors of objects linked to the ship. Other items in the auction give a glimpse into life aboard the Titanic’s 2,223 passengers and crew, only 706 of whom survived.
A blanket used by one of these survivors to keep warm in a lifeboat was classified by the auction house as “one of the rarest three-dimensional objects we have seen” and sold for more than R$570,000.
Previously, the blanket belonged to Frederick Toppin, a manager for the company that owned the Titanic. He bought the object on a New York pier when he met rescued passengers coming ashore, according to the auction house.
But 1,517 people aboard the Titanic did not survive, and a pocket watch belonging to Sinai Kantor, a Russian immigrant traveling to the United States in second class, marks the moment he entered the water and later died. The object was sold for around R$584,000.
Other items for sale included a label, used to identify mail packages. Ship employees died trying to save the objects, taking them to the upper floors of the Titanic so that they would not be lost in the flood, according to the auction house.
Source: CNN Brasil
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