A HUGE haul of artifacts salvaged from the Titanic could fetch £122m if they are allowed to go under the hammer next year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the loss of the ship.
More than 5,500 items from the “unsinkable” White Star passenger liner, including fine china, ship fittings and portions of hull that were recovered from the wreck, will be sold as a single lot.
The first glimpse inside Southampton’s Sea City Museum – see the Review section in tomorrow’s Southern Daily Echo.
The Titanic treasures were amassed during seven trips to the wreck, which rests about two-and-a-half miles below the ocean surface in the North Atlantic.
The auction is scheduled for April 1 by Guernsey’s, a New York auction house – but the results will not be announced until April 15, the date the Titanic sank after striking an iceberg a century ago on her maiden voyage from Southampton.
Southampton’s £15m Titanic-themed Sea City attraction, which is currently being built alongside the Civic Centre, is due to open on April 10 – the anniversary of the liner leaving the port.
Titanic’s sinking claimed the lives of more than 1,500 people, more than a third of which were from Southampton, most of whom were working as crew on the ship.
The US auction is subject to approval by a federal judge in Virginia because of legal wrangling over ownership of salvage from Titanic.
An international team led by oceanographer Robert Ballard located the wreckage in 1985, about 400 miles off Newfoundland, Canada.
US district judge Rebecca Beach Smith, who has overseen the case from her Norfolk courtroom in Virginia, has ruled that official salvage company RMS Titanic, which recovered items during seven dives between 1987 and 2004, is entitled to full compensation for the artifacts.
Judge Smith, a maritime jurist, who has called the Titanic an “international treasure”, has approved covenants and conditions that the company previously worked out with the federal US government, including banning selling the collection off piece by piece.
The conditions also require RMS to make the artifacts available “to present and future generations for public display and exhibition, historical review, scientific and scholarly research, and educational purposes”.
Last year RMS carried out the first comprehensive mapping survey of the vessel with 3D imagery from bow to stern.
The new images filmed using a remotecontrolled vessel will eventually be made available for public viewing and used to help oceanographers and archaeologists explain the ship’s violent descent to the ocean bottom.
It is also intended to provide answers on the state of the wreck, which scientists say is showing increasing signs of deterioration.
