A hard-tack biscuit that was originally part of a lifeboat survival kit from the Titanic has sold for £15,000, or around $23,000 USD, at an auction in the UK. The price was around £5,000 more than the 103-year old snack was expected to fetch.
The biscuit, or cracker, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're living, was kept by James Fenwick, a passenger onboard the SS Carpathia, which aided the rescue efforts of the doomed ocean liner.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said "It is incredible that this biscuit has survived such a dramatic event." The sinking of the Titanic claimed 1500 lives and is one of the most well-known ocean disasters. As far as estimating the price of the stale snack, Aldridge told the Salisbury Journal a biscuit from one of Sir Ernest Shackleton's polar expeditions sold around £3,000, and "there is a biscuit from the Lusitania," the ocean liner sunk by German submarines during the first world war, in a museum in the Republic of Ireland.
Given the notoriety of the biscuit's ship of origin, Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneers put an estimated price of £8,000-£11,000. A photograph of the iceberg believed to have sunk the "unsinkable" Titanic sold at the same auction for £21,000.
At the beginning of October, the original bikini worn by Slave Leia in Return of the Jedi sold at auction for $96,000.
