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HOPE AND DESPAIR:Marie Church's diary and the letter from a passenger aboard Sardinian will be sold at auction this month.

Two rare and dramatic eyewitness accounts from before and after the sinking of Titanic have been made available for sale.

One of them is a harrowing letter written by a passenger on a ship which stopped at the disaster site in heavy fog just days after the sinking.

The male author wrote of how he saw a drowned corpse floating yards from the ship and how nervous passengers feared their own vessel, Sardinian, would sink.

The comments are in stark contrast to the thoughts of an excited woman aboard the only ship to have seen Titanic on her ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic.

Marie Church's diary extract is the only written account known to exist of the luxury liner going at full-steam.

The young woman wrote of how beautiful Titanic looked when she saw her three days before she struck an iceberg and sank, killing more than 1,500 people.

The two accounts are now set to fetch more than £3,000 each when they go under the hammer at the twice-yearly Titanic and White Star Line auction.

Chilling Andrew Aldridge, of auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Sons, of Devizes, Wiltshire, said: "These two items really do illustrate the rise and fall of Titanic in a snapshot.

"In the diary, you have the dream of the biggest ship on her maiden voyage and then you get the horror of this graphic letter which deals with her demise.

"It must have been a harrowing and chilling experience for the hundreds of passengers on Sardinian to be stuck at the same spot where Titanic sank just days before.

"It must have played on their minds that they were floating above this massive watery grave."

The letter was written by a man known only by his initials of DV and was addressed to his mother, a Mrs A Osman, of Reading, Berkshire.

It is believed he was a first class passenger on RMS Sardinian, which sailed from Britain to New Brunswick, Canada, and had to stop at the disaster site on April 23, 1912.

In the letter he told of how a ship commissioned to recover the bodies came alongside Sardinian to borrow some canvass to wrap up some of the 200 corpses on board.

Referring to the nervous state of the passengers, the author wrote: "We can think of nothing else but that sad disaster to Titanic.

"It is not generally spoken of on the ship. We ourselves are laying to in a fog in the same place.

"The captain is making every precaution and I think will take us safely to port.

"It has been the most strange trip and one more experience which I would sooner have been without. We are almost eyewitnesses, you see.

"Only to think of that big boat, 45,000 tons, gone to the bottom with 2,000 passengers. It will not bear thinking of. Last night a boat put off to us from an American steamer cruising round in search of bodies. They had the corpses of over 200 men.

"Although we did not make any remark there was a corpse floating around (the length of our garden) from our boat. It was quite distressing to say the least.

"The errand of the boat was not much better for they had come to borrow canvases from us to bury the dead."

Less then two weeks earlier, Marie Church wrote in her diary of seeing Titanic on her maiden voyage.

Marie was a young woman from Boston, Massachusetts, who was sailing on the ship Adriatic from New York to Liverpool when it passed by the Titanic at 6pm on April 11.

She wrote how she was cabin-bound because of illness but rushed to the deck to glimpse the famous Titanic.

Beautiful sight She wrote: "I had to venture out on deck for the company's newest four-funnelled ship Titanic passed us on her maiden trip to New York and it certainly was a beautiful sight.

"We gave her three salutes but couldn't hear her answer - probably because of the wind."

The diary and the letter will be sold at the Titanic auction on April 19.

12:05pm Thursday 10th April 2008

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