Two rare letters handwritten by a passenger on Titanic rescue ship RMS Carpathia are up for auction in the U.K. this weekend, reports Fox News. Dated April 17, 1912, the letters, which have never been published before, are written by Eleanor Danforth, a passenger on Carpathia, which was traveling from New York to Europe when it received the Titanic’s distress call. Danforth describes standing on the ship’s deck as it rushed to help the Titanic and seeing the “glimmer of the iceberg” that the massive ship struck. The doomed liner hit the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, and sank just over two hours later. More than 1,500 people died. Danforth writes that she was urged to return to her stateroom, where she watched the rescue from a porthole.
“There I watched the first boat come in, the people climbing the ladder up the side of the ship or being pulled up in a swing sort of thing,” she wrote, according to Fox. “A bag was let down for the babies and children. Shortly after we went up on deck again, and the boats came in one by one.”
Carpathia arrived at the Titanic just hours after the boat sunk. “How some of those people stood the cold and, half-frozen as they must have been, managed to climb the ladder I don’t understand, because some of them were in the lifeboats about seven or eight hours, if not longer,” Danforth wrote. “Some were dressed in evening clothes, some in anything and everything, and others in only their nightclothes.” She says that she helped feed and clothe two French children, about 18 months and three years old.
The letters will be auctioned by Henry Aldridge & Son on April 21. They are estimated to go between $7,000 to $11,300.
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