Titanic Deck Chair Company
A Piece Of History
In August 1997, Ian McCarthy and Ralph Cook were attending an auction at Mark Enik's Island Antiques on their home island of Nantucket. One of the many items put on the block that day was a weathered old deck chair covered in a crust of flaky red paint. Nobody bid on the chair that day. But six months later, McCarthy and Cook quietly bought it from Enik. The price: $4,000.
Why such a handsome sum for a rickety old chair? Because they believed it might be a deck chair from the fabled, ill-fated ocean liner called Titanic. By March, the duo was on the road in search of proof that their chair was, indeed, a survivor of the Titanic. Thus began their trek that took them from Nantucket to Nova Scotia and ultimately to Paris. It was there that they finally proved that a certain Captain Julien Louis LeMarteleur did, in fact, fished a deck chair out of the North Atlantic while also helping to rescue survivors of the Titanic disaster. And it was their chair.
As it turns out, the Nantucket chair is only one of two deck chairs to be authenticated as relics of the Titanic. Rather than sell it to a museum or wealthy collector, McCarthy and Cook founded the aptly named Titanic Deck Chair Company to produce replicas of the chair. The original was crafted from Burmese teak. The modern version is solid mahogany and folds down smoothly for easy storage. Even the smallest details, down to the brass nameplate on the back of the headrest, have been lovingly recreated. After all, this chair was meant for first-class passengers.
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