She wrote 'I wish you were here.' Now her postcard from the Titanic is up for auction
Three days before the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in 1912, a maid on board named Sarah Daniels wrote a postcard to a friend back home in England.
It was a wistful message, written in pencil: "I wish you were here, it is a lovely boat and it would do you good. Am just going on deck."
Daniels, who was 37, survived the famous tragedy, and so did that postcard.
It will go up for auction next month at Warwick & Warwick Auctioneers in England, where experts expect it to fetch more than $26,000, reports Metro UK.
"The postcard is very important in that not many postcards have been reported being mailed from Titanic," auctioneer and postcard expert Colin Such told The Express in London and other British publications.
He said the last Titanic postcard the auction house sold was in 2002 for about $14,000, "and the market has moved on a lot since then. The estimate now is ($20,000 to $26,000.)," he told the Express.
"It will appeal to collectors of Titanic memorabilia — of which there are plenty in this country and even more in the USA. If we get them interested, that figure could be dwarfed," Such said.
According to the Warwick & Warwick website, the postcard was written and posted on board the Titanic and addressed to a "Miss Green" of Birmingham, England.
Daniels signed it with her known nickname, "Fisgig."
It bears a date stamp of April 11, 1912, and shows it was posted in Queenstown, Ireland, from where mail written on the ship was sent, the catalog description says.
Daniels, born in London, was a maid to a wealthy family named Allison from Montreal, Canada. She traveled in first class with the parents, their two infant children and the children's nurse, according to the auction house.
On the night the ship hit the iceberg, Daniels, sensing something was wrong, went out by herself to investigate, according to the Encyclopedia Titanica.
She was "unable to convince either Hudson Allison, who became angry at her for awakening the family, nor (nursemaid) Alice Cleaver, to join her, or that there was any danger," the website of Titanic history writes.
"She then encountered several crew members who directed her to lifeboat 8, and assured her that 'it was just a precautionary measure,' wherein she boarded the lifeboat, which was then lowered from the ship."
Only one of the family's babies, a baby boy named Trevor, and the nursemaid, survived, as well.
“The boat I was in was not very crowded," she told the Manitoba Free Press, according to the auction house. "There were only 4 men in the boat and they took the oars. There was no officer in the boat and a woman steered as we were rowing away in the darkness.”
What happened to Daniels after that is a mystery, according to the Titanic encyclopedia, though it's believed she lived out the rest of her life in Canada.
The auction of her postcard is set for July 18, according to the auction house.
This story was originally published June 19, 2018 at 2:16 PM with the headline "She wrote 'I wish you were here.' Now her postcard from the Titanic is up for auction."