A newly unearthed photograph of the iceberg that may have sunk the Titanic has emerged 112 years after the disaster.
The black and white image was captured by an undertaker working on the body recovery ship that arrived at the wreck site after the sinking.
It will now go on sale at Henry Aldridge & Son Auctioneers in Devizes, Wiltshire, for an estimated price of between £4,000 and £7,000.
It shows a large glacier with a strange shape like an elephant on the surface of the North Atlantic.
It was taken two days after the luxury cruise ship hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, killing 1,522 people.
A newly unearthed photograph of the iceberg that may have sunk the Titanic has emerged 112 years after the disaster. The black and white image was captured by an undertaker working on the body recovery ship that arrived at the wreck site after the sinking.
It was taken two days after the luxury cruise ship hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, killing 1,522 people.
The photographer, believed to be funeral director John Snow Jr, then placed the photograph on a cardboard stand and simply titled it “Titanitic”.
Mr. Snow’s father ran a funeral home in Nova Scotia and when news of the tragedy broke, he and his team of embalmers were summoned to Halifax.
They boarded the cable ship Mackay-Bennett, which was loaded with 100 coffins and 100 tons of ice to preserve the bodies.
They set out for the wreck site 800 miles away and arrived four hours later, on April 17, 1912.
The crew began their grim task the next morning. In total they recovered 306 bodies from the sea.
Those identified as first class passengers were embalmed on the ship and placed in coffins. Among them were the bodies of John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man on board, and Isidor Straus, owner of Macy’s department store.
The second-class passengers were embalmed and wrapped in tarps. Some 116 steerage passengers and crew were buried at sea.
The ship returned to Halifax seven days later with 190 Titanic victims.
The 5-by-3-inch photo of the iceberg was passed down through the Snow family until it was acquired by a Titanic memorabilia collector about 30 years ago.
Captain Edward John Smith, captain of the RMS Titanic that went down with the ship. The painting is now for sale at Henry Aldridge & Son Auctioneers in Devizes, Wiltshire, for an estimate of £4,000 to £7,000.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said: “No one can say for sure that this was THE iceberg that sank the Titanic.”
“But we can say that, after the rescue ship Carpathia, the Mackay-Bennett was one of the first ships to arrive at the wreck site and that the undertaker on board decided to photograph this iceberg.”
‘He must have had his reasons for taking a photo of this iceberg.
‘Titanic subtitled it and put it together for posterity.
“It had not been sold before and our supplier acquired it directly from Mr Snow’s family in the early 1990s.
“It is an extremely rare photograph and we are sure it will attract a lot of interest.”
The “unsinkable” Titanic was speeding through an ice field in the North Atlantic when it struck an iceberg at 10:20 p.m. on April 14, 1912.
Lookout Fred Fleet had difficulty spotting the glacier at first because the water was so calm that no waves were breaking at the base, which was a telltale sign that there was one.
The liner sank at 2:20 a.m. on April 15.
A photograph has already been seen before of another iceberg that could also have been the one that hit the Titanic on the night of April 14, 1912.
That was taken by a crew member of the Minia, another body recovery ship that arrived at the scene on April 22, a week later.
And in 2020, a photograph of an iceberg taken two days before the tragedy by the captain of a passing passenger ship was sold at auction.
Captain W. Wood was on the SS Etonian and noted the geographical coordinates of the glacier which were almost the same as when the Titanic sank 40 hours later.
The last photograph will be sold on April 27 in Devizes.