Image: A sampling of artifacts recovered from the Titanic. Which artifacts would be put up for auction has not been made public. Credit: R.M.S. Titanic Inc.
By Marc Davis
More than a century after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, the company that owns exclusive salvage rights to the shipwreck wants to auction about 100 artifacts raised from the ocean floor during the first recovery effort nearly 40 years ago.
The doomed vessel’s wreckage has been an object of fascination and controversy since it was found in 1985, and the newly proposed sale is already stirring fresh debate over the fate of the thousands of items pulled from the site.
When the company, R.M.S. Titanic, last proposed selling artifacts, in 2016, it was struggling through bankruptcy and the plan drew objections from the U.S. and French governments, as well as from UNESCO and other cultural institutions.
The latest potential sale was proposed in a document that R.M.S. submitted in March to the federal court in Norfolk, Va., which oversees the recovery effort and may have to approve the auction. The company placed the filing under seal, in an effort to keep the proposed sale secret while the court considered the request, but the judge decided it should be made public.
Read the full article on The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/titanic-artifacts-auction-sale.html
