It has been 112 years since RMS Titanic sank several miles off the coast of Canada, and the photo above is said to have been taken two days after the event, and it apparently shows the iceberg that sank the ship. It was taken by the chief embalmer, John Snow Jr., who was on the Cable Ship Mackay-Bennett to help recover some of the bodies for burial.
Since more than 1,500 passengers died, the crew who were tasked to search for the bodies and collect them had to choose which ones will be taken back home and which ones will be laid to rest on the waters. They were able to recover 306 bodies, and they used the class system in the Titanic as reference to determine who needed to be brought back and who could be buried at sea.
The reason behind this was that passengers who had first-class tickets were more than likely to require the body to be identified so that their bereaved family may be paid from their life insurance. One such example would be Isidor Straus, the owner of Macy's department store, who was embalmed on the ship and placed in a coffin.
Second-class passengers were also embalmed and wrapped in a canvas, meanwhile, the 116 third-class passengers recovered by the crew had unfortunately been laid to rest at sea.
As for the photo, it has never been officially verified that it was the actual iceberg that sunk the Titanic, however, given the timing of the events, it is probable that the photo taken by John Snow Jr. aboard the Mackay-Bennett was the iceberg.
It went up for auction on April 27th, and originally, it was estimated to sell for £4,000 - 7,000 (around $5,000 - 8,700). Henry Aldridge auction house was able to sell it for £17,500 or about $22,000, as part of their Auction of Titanic, White Star and Transport Memorabilia sale.
Other items that went up for sale during the auction included John Jacob Astor IV's gold pocket watch engraved with his initials, and it sold for £1.175 million (around $1.4 million), as well as the violin case of the ship's bandleader Wallace Hartley which sold for £360,000 (around $450,000). Hartley's violin had already been sold in 2013 for £1.1 million (around $1.7 million).
(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)