Items Tied to Titanic's Millionaire's Lifeboat Are Sold

The Titanic's last lunch menu, saved by a first-class passenger who climbed aboard a lifeboat whose crew was said to have been bribed to row away instead of rescue more people, sold at auction for $88,000 on Wednesday. New York's Lion Heart Autographs offered the menu and two other previously unknown artifacts from Lifeboat 1, which were sold by the son of a man who was given the items by a descendant of one of the survivors of the lifeboat. Abraham Lincoln Salomon was among a handful of first-class passengers who boarded the 40-person lifeboat, dubbed the Money Boat or Millionaire's Boat by the press because of unfounded rumors one of the passengers bribed seven crew members to quickly row the boat away from the sinking ocean liner.

The menu, which lists corned beef, dumplings, and other savory items, is signed by another first-class passenger who escaped on another lifeboat. It's believed he and Salomon lunched together that fateful day in 1912. Salomon also took away a printed ticket from the Titanic's opulent Turkish baths, which recorded a person's weight when seated in a specially designed upholstered lounge chair. The ticket bears the names of three of the five other first-class passengers with him on Lifeboat 1. One of four weighing chair tickets known to exist, it sold for $11,000. The third item, a letter that fetched $7,500, was written to Salomon six months after the disaster by a woman who worked for aristocratic fashion designer Lucy Duff-Gordon and her Scottish husband, Lord Cosmo Duff-Gordon, who was rumored to have been behind the bribe. The British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry cleared the Duff-Gordons of wrongdoing, though the inquiry determined the boat could have saved others had it turned around. (More Titanic stories.)