Menu, other items from Titanic to go on auction

Three artifacts belonging to passengers who survived the 1912 sinking of the Titanic are to be sold online next month, two US auction houses staging the event announced on Monday. The items are a letter written by a survivor, a menu and a ticket to the Turkish bath aboard the vessel, with each item expected to fetch several thousand dollars. The September 30 Internet sale is being held by Lion Heart Autographs, and the online auction house Invaluable.com, and coincides with the 30-year anniversary in September of the discovery of the RMS Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Bidding will get underway at noon (1600 GMT) on September 30, with would-be buyers from around the world able to take part. The menu shows the meal served at the last luncheon aboard the Titanic, and is expected to fetch as much as $70,000. The letter, along with the accompanying envelope, was written by one Titanic survivor to another six months after the disaster, and makes mention of the ordeal. Also on sale is one of only four known printed tickets from the Titanic's weighing chair, a device used to record a person's weight in the Titanic's Turkish Baths' cooling room. Each of the items belonged to some of the very few passengers who succeeded in escaping from the disaster by boarding Life Number One, made infamous by several Titanic crew members who rowed away in it to flee, leaving more than 1,500 to perish in the icy water. Bids can be placed on various websites, including and , as well as France's and China's . The Titanic departed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England on April 11, 1912, in what had been billed as a risk-free transatlantic voyage to New York. It went down off the coast of Newfoundland on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg, in what remains the most storied maritime tragedy of all time.