Which treasures were lost when Titanic sank, and what did some survivors smuggle onto lifeboats?
When Titanic sank in April 1912, undoubtedly the highest cost was the more than 1,500 people who perished in the disaster on the Atlantic Ocean. But with the prestige of its maiden voyage attracting wealthy clientele, there was also a huge number of treasures on board. Hilary Mitchell reveals the historical riches lost to the sea – from ancient trinkets to Victorian art valued as the most valuable of its day…
It’s an eerie photograph, to say the least. A two-foot-tall bronze statuette of the Roman goddess of the hunt, known as Diana of Versailles, peers sightlessly to the right, the carefully cast, delicate folds of her tunic tarnished and darkened by decades of salt water.
Originally gracing the mantlepiece of the ornate fireplace in Titanic’s opulent first-class lounge, she now lies half-buried in the abyssal darkness, 2.5 miles below the ocean’s surface.
The picture was taken in 2024 by oceanographers from RMS Titanic Inc, a US company that holds the rights to the 113-year-old wreck. The statuette hadn’t been caught on camera since 1986, when marine scientist Bob Ballard led an expedition to the site using the deep-sea vehicle Alvin.
Eight subsequent visits had failed to locate her, and there was some concern she had been illegally salvaged and sold. Finding her was like “finding a needle in a haystack”, said James Penca, a researcher on the RMS Titanic Inc. project. She was rediscovered in the final hours of the three-week-long dive.
The statuette isn’t an original Roman bronze. It’s a replica of a much-larger marble sculpture currently on display in the Louvre in Paris, itself a partially restored Roman copy (first or second century BC) of a lost Greek bronze original attributed to Athenian sculptor Leochares (c325 BC).
However, it was valuable in its own right; a prestigious, costly piece of decoration. In some ways, the Diana statuette can be used as a symbol to represent thousands of artefacts that were lost when Titanic hit an iceberg and sank beneath the waves on her maiden voyage in the early hours of 15 April 1912, resulting in the tragic, harrowing deaths of more than 1,500 men, women and children.
Who was the richest person to die in the Titanic disaster?
On its maiden voyage, Titanic was transporting many of the era’s wealthiest people to the US, several of whom were returning from lengthy sojourns in Europe.
One of these elite passengers was John Jacob Astor IV, who was thought to be among the richest people in the world at that time, with a net worth of roughly $87m (equivalent to $2.83bn today) when he died in the disaster.
A year after the tragedy, The New York Times reported that the claims brought against Titanic's operator, the White Star Line, had reached more than $16m ($16,804,112.23 to be precise, equivalent to over half a billion today), a combination of death, personal injury and lost property claims.
One Mrs Irene Wallach Harris claimed $1,000,000 for the loss of her husband, Henry Birkhardt Harris, a Broadway producer and theatre owner – which The Washington Post reported was “the heaviest of the 279 claims so far filed” in January 1913.
These claims, many of which can be accessed online, offer a partial record of some of the items lost in the sinking of Titanic. However, many more valuables have been completely lost to history – because their owners joined them on their journey to the bottom of the freezing ocean.
John Jacob Astor IV’s young wife Madeleine, who survived the disaster, is not on the list of claimants, but other first-class passengers did put in requests for compensation. These petitions shed some light on the huge array of finery some of these wealthy individuals brought on board.
Which Egyptian artefacts were on Titanic?
American socialite and philanthropist Margaret Brown – later dubbed ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’ – put in an insurance claim for $14,623 following the tragedy. Her lost items included an ermine opera cape valued at $300, a Brussels lace gown ($375), a $700 sealskin jacket, a necklace worth a staggering $7,000 – about $220,000 today – and “three crates of ancient models for Denver museum”, which were worth $500 in total. That’s over $16,000 today.
These “crates of ancient models” contained Egyptian antiquities, which Brown had collected during her travels to the country before boarding Titanic.
It’s not known what, exactly, these chests did contain, but it’s possible to hazard a guess. In 1912, tourists visiting Egypt could purchase a range of historically and archaeologically significant relics, as the trade in ancient artefacts was still relatively unregulated.
Though the Antiquities Service of Egypt was working to curb looting at the time, enforcement was inconsistent. Many genuine ancient artifacts were openly sold in markets.
Some of the most commonly available relics included Shabti figures (also known as ushabtis or shawabtis), which were statuettes placed in burials from the Middle Kingdom – between about 4,000 and 3,500 years ago – until the Ptolemaic Period, around 2,300 years ago. It was also possible to buy genuine New Kingdom (c1550–1070 BC) scarab amulets and original canopic jars containing mummified organs.
Remarkably, Margaret Brown carried one of these treasures, a shabti, with her onto lifeboat number 6 when she abandoned ship. According to The Molly Brown House Museum, based in Denver, Colorado, “Molly thought to take her treasured three-inch turquoise-colored Egyptian statue purchased in Cairo and placed it in her pocket for luck.”
She is believed to have gifted it to Arthur Rostron, captain of Carpathia, after the liner rescued her and the other Titanic survivors. According to Egyptologist Paul Boughton, who spent some time tracking it down, it eventually made its way into a 1998 exhibition called Titanic: Fortune and Fate at The Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Virginia.
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What was the most expensive item to go down with Titanic?
Unfortunately, none of the other Egyptian artefacts that Brown intended to donate ended up in a museum. They’re down in the depths, with the Diana of Versailles sculpture, as well as the most expensive single item of property that was lost that night: a painting titled ‘La Circassienne au bain’ by French artist Merry-Joseph Blondel.
This large, neoclassical artwork was brought on board by a Swedish businessman, 28-year-old Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson. It was valued at $100,000 (which would be around $3m today).
When compensation claims were filed in January 1913, the painting was highlighted by the press as the largest claim made against the White Star Line for a single piece of baggage.
Björnström-Steffansson survived the disaster, by jumping onto the empty bow of one of the last lifeboats to be launched from the starboard side of Titanic: a craft known as Collapsible D, which entered the water at 1.55am, just 25 minutes before the ship sank completely.
‘La Circassienne au bain’ had been completed by Blondel in 1814, and it was exhibited at the Paris Salon at the Louvre the same year. The subject of the portrait is a Circassian (Eastern European) woman, who is pictured getting into a bath – rather awkwardly, if surviving etchings are to be believed.
According to contemporary reports, it didn’t initially set the art world alight, but as Blondel became more famous, the work became more popular, and its value went up.
It’s not known for how much Björnström-Steffansson’s claim for ‘La Circasienne au bain’ was settled, but it’s unlikely that he received the full $100,000. The total eventually paid out to claimants was $644,000, significantly less than the $16,804,112.23 that had been asked for.
Was there a car on Titanic?
Artefacts and artwork weren’t the only expensive items lost at sea that night; an extremely valuable French-made car also sank beneath the waves.
Fans of the 1997 smash-hit James Cameron movie Titanic will no doubt remember the steamy scene where Jack (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) consummate their simmering romance in the back of a 1912 Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville in the ship’s cargo hold.
Although James Cameron played fast and loose with some historical facts while making the film, the car wasn’t one of them. There was indeed a 1912 Renault Type CB Coupé de Ville on board, although it was probably sealed in a crate to protect it against damage and therefore not easily accessible to amorous twenty-somethings.
The car was purchased in Europe by one William Carter, an American millionaire (and keen polo player) who was travelling with his family. He survived by boarding the very last lifeboat to be launched from Titanic, Collapsible C, which entered the water at 2am. At that point, Titanic's forecastle deck was almost completely submerged.
William Carter was joined on Collapsible C by White Star Line managing director J Bruce Ismay. Both men would later face criticism for not going down with the ship, particularly given the fact that 166 women and children were still on board when it sank into the Atlantic Ocean.
But the millionaire polo player defended his and Ismay’s actions shortly after the disaster.
In a statement to The New York Times given on 22 April 1912, Carter said: "The statements which have been made by Mr. Ismay's conduct are an injustice to him […] The women that were in the boat were from steerage, with their children. I guess there were about forty of them. Mr. Ismay and myself and several of the officers walked up and down the deck, crying 'Are there more women here?' We called for several minutes and got no answer. One of the officers then declared that if we wanted to we could get into the boat if we took the place of a seaman. He gave us this preference because we were among the first-class passengers. Mr. Ismay called again, and after we got no reply we got into the lifeboat.”
Carter later put in a claim for $11,670.00, including $5,000 for the car – equivalent to around $162,000 today. He also requested compensation for two pet dogs, which he said were worth $100 and $200 respectively. Although there were reports at the time that he was travelling with his prized polo ponies, he did not claim for their loss, so it seems unlikely that they were on board.
Were any valuable literary works lost in the sinking of Titanic?
Another unique item that was lost that night included one of the most lavishly decorated books the world has ever seen: a jewel-encrusted edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
The stunning edition of the Rubáiyát, a selection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyám ‘(the Astronomer-Poet of Persia’) was the work of acclaimed bookbinder Francis Sangorski, and had been commissioned by John Stonehouse, manager of Sotheran's bookshop in London.
The book was encrusted with 1,050 jewels including specially cut rubies, topazes and emeralds. Around 100 square feet of gold leaf and 5,000 pieces of leather were also used. After it was completed, the Daily Mirror described it as "the most remarkable specimen of binding ever produced".
Sotheran's put the book on sale for £1,000 – the equivalent of around £97,000, but it failed to sell.
"It was three times more expensive than anything else in Sotheran's stock. I think it was just too expensive for the UK market," the bookshop's managing director, Chris Saunders, told the BBC in 2022.
On 29 March 1912, the book went to auction at Sotheby's and was purchased by the agent of a New York book dealer called Gabriel Wells, who paid £405 for it, quite the bargain.
Unfortunately, Wells’s celebrations were set to be short-lived. The book narrowly missed a crossing on 6 April and was instead taken aboard the next ship, RMS Titanic, and was lost.
Egyptian antiquities, a Neoclassical painting, a car, a jewelled book: all now sit at the bottom of the ocean, and unlike the Diana of Versailles sculpture, none have been spotted by any visiting divers. What has been seen, though, are scores of shoes belonging to the men, women and children who died that night, left behind after the bodies of their owners decomposed over time.
It’s a ghoulish reminder of the real treasures that were lost with Titanic: human beings.
Who knows what these people travelling to start their new life in America might have achieved when they got there; how many never got the chance to be acclaimed novelists, or artists, or bookmakers, or car designers.
The world might look very different today if there had been enough lifeboats for everyone on board, meaning that more than 1,500 potential-filled lives were not cut short.