Fewer than fifty verified Titanic survivor artifacts remain private
History
When the ocean floor is your final resting place, a simple canvas life jacket becomes a million-dollar relic of the night the world changed.
A single cork-filled life jacket recovered from a survivor recently sold for $900,000, nearly triple what similar vests fetched just thirty years ago. These artifacts are so valuable because they represent the thin line between life and death in the 28-degree waters of the North Atlantic. While thousands of items have been salvaged from the debris field two miles down, items with a documented paper trail to the 705 people who actually made it onto the Carpathia are vanishingly rare.