London - Did he see the disaster coming? Just five days before the Titanic sank , a 1st class passenger wrote a mysterious postcard.

113 years after the sinking of the Titanic (April 15, 1912), the postcard was auctioned off. It was written by Colonel Archibald Gracie, one of the 709 survivors of the disaster.

In the card, which was dated April 10 and delivered during the Titanic's second stopover in Ireland, the colonel shares his thoughts on the largest ship in the world at the time with an acquaintance. "She's a good ship, but I'll wait for the end of my voyage before I pass judgment on her."

At the same time, Gracie makes it clear that he would probably have preferred to make the journey across the Atlantic on another ship: "The Oceanic is like an old friend, and although she does not have the polished style and varied pleasures of that great ship, I do miss her for her seaworthy qualities and yacht-like appearance."

Five days later, the Titanic collided with an iceberg off Newfoundland, and the rest is history.

Now the card from the estate of a descendant of the recipient of the card has been auctioned in England. The auction house Henry Aldridge & Sonwas hoping for 60,000 British pounds (70,000 euros) . In the end, it was "slightly" more: a bidder paid a whopping 300,000 pounds, or just under 350,000 euros, for the historic document, reports the Guardian.

Colonel Archibald Gracie is considered one of the most famous survivors of the Titanic.

Survivors reported how the colonel looked after women and children during the disaster , fetched blankets for them and helped them to get into the lifeboats. It was only shortly before the Titanic sank that he left the ship with a courageous leap into the water and clung to a capsized lifeboat with other survivors.

Many people lost their lives in the freezing water, Gracie later recalled in his eyewitness account "The truth about the Titanic".

Archibald Gracie was never to recover from the hypothermia he suffered on the night of the disaster. He died at the end of 1912, a few months later, at the age of 53. His book was published posthumously and is considered to be the most detailed account by a Titanic survivor.