Titanic : Fortune & Fate

Letters, mementos, and personal effects from those who sailed on the lost ship

There is a haunting aura surrounding the authentic items possessed by those aboard the Titanic on its last night at sea.  Titanic: Fortune & Fate unveils these historic treasures—many of which have never before been seen outside private collections.

Multimillionaire John Jacob Astor’s gold pocket watch and cuff links; one of three existing Titanic life vests, which kept a man from drowning even as he froze to death in the 28-degree water; the 2,700-year-old Egyptian talisman “unsinkable” Molly Brown carried with her to safety; and a silk scarf that Madeline Astor gave to third-class passenger Leah Aks to warm her infant son as they waited for rescue—all are among the poignant reminders of the ship’s victims and survivors.

First-class passenger Jack Thayer, who helped women and children into lifeboats, then finally jumped into the water as the ship was making its icy descent, remembered, “We were a mass of hopeless, dazed humanity attempting, as the Almighty and Nature made us, to keep our final breath until the last possible moment.” But it was Steward Angus Davis who eerily predicted the great tragedy when he wrote before the vessel sailed that he “hoped the ship would go down to the bottom of the ocean.”  His prophetic words symbolize Titanic’s timeless warning of the dangers of human fallibility, frailty, and pride, which that night, according to first-class passenger Marian Thayer, took the form of “the most awful thing that anyone could ever conceive.”