Cracker From the Titanic Fetches Huge Price at Auction


A cracker that survived the sinking of the Titanic was sold to a collector in Greece for $22,968 by British auction house Henry Aldridge and Sons. Clearly the saying "A fool and his money are soon parted" applies here.
The biscuit was preserved in an envelope with the words “Pilot biscuit from Titanic lifeboat April 1912,“ by James Fenwick, a passenger aboard the Carpathia, a ship that went to help pick up survivors.
Apparently cracker collecting is a thing. A cracker from the Ernest Shackleton polar expedition fetched $4,600 a few years ago. And a museum in Ireland has a cracker from the Lusitania, a passenger ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, with an estimated worth of between $12,290 and $15,364.
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Thanks Bruce!
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  1. soubriquet12:18 am

    I recall we had a few tins of lifeboat 'hardtack biscuits' at home when I was a kid. I have no idea why, as we lived at least sixty miles from the sea, and my dad had been in the army, not the navy. But then again, one of his pals was a ship's chandler, I remember being taken into his dockside warehouse and seeing sleds and crates packed and ready to load onto one of Lauritzen's polar supply ships.
    My grandfather, though, was a sailor man, a Cape Horner, and my mother told how in the southern ocean, when the storms were so great no hot food could be had, the men lived off hardtack which was kept in wooden barrels. Alas, it was also usually infested with weevils, so the men would rap their meals hard against the table to shake the inhabitants loose, and bet upon their respective wildlife in a crawling race out of a drawn circle.

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