Archibald Gracie IV was the All-American sort of American.

He was born in Mobile, Alabama, in January of 1858. At the onset of the American Civil War, his father defied his Unionist family and in 1862, he became a general in the Confederate Army. He was killed while he was looking through a spyglass at Petersburg in 1864, when an artillery shell exploded in front of him.

The young Gracie wasn’t yet 6 years old when his father died, and that same year, was sent to boarding school in New Hampshire. Gracie IV grew up to attend (but not graduate) from West Point and become a colonel in the 7^th New York Regiment.

Colonel Gracie ended up on Titanic after a solo trip to Europe to decompress; he had spent 7 years writing a book about the Battle of Chickamauga, which his late father had been in.

Gracie spent his time as one would expect a dapper gentleman of stature to, and we know a great deal about how he occupied himself thanks to his account of the sinking, written shortly after the disaster in 1912.

And did he enjoy himself.

During his time on “this floating palace,” Colonel Gracie offered his services to a group of women traveling alone. This was a common practice at the time, to escort unaccompanied ladies to ensure their safety and well-being.

Colonel Gracie also spent a great deal of time with Isidor and Ida Straus, whose story of tragic devotion is easily the most famous of all the couples on board Titanic.

Colonel Gracie and Isidor were both armchair historians, and they made a hobby out of discussing the American Civil War, as they had both been affiliated to the Confederate cause. Gracie lent Isidor a book about Chickamauga—his own book, naturally.

Isidor returned it with gratitude to the Colonel on Sunday, April 14, 1912.

Gracie was also an esteemed member of an impromptu and exclusive club called “Our Coterie,” a group of seven writers, including Hugh Woolner and Edward Austin Kent, who met every day. It was essentially Titanic’s Finer Things Club.

On Sunday morning, Colonel Gracie spent a concentrated amount of time exercising, and made a point to take advantage of Titanic’s many athletic facilities, including the gymnasium, the racquetball court, and the heated swimming bath. The latter activity clearly caused him some mental anguish as he thought back on the sinking.

This was hardly Colonel Gracie’s only moment of irony within his written narrative. He also wrote of returning a book to the First-Class library, and remarked, "How little I thought that in the next few hours I should be a witness and a party to a scene to which this book could furnish no counterpart."

Gracie was awoken by the collision with the iceberg. He testified to hearing the ship’s steam sound off. He also felt the engines cease, though it was only “slight.”

Colonel Gracie went about assisting people into boats—including the ladies that he had made his special charges—and was witness to some of Titanic's most noted partings, including those of the John Jacob Astor and his pregnant young wife. Gracie was also one of those who tried to persuade Mrs. Straus to part with Isidor and get into a lifeboat, but she refused.

Unsurprisingly, Colonel Gracie did not take to a lifeboat.

He spent most the sinking assisting Second Officer Charles Lightoller in filling lifeboats and providing those passengers with blankets.

Gracie was also vital to the launch of the so-called "collapsible" lifeboats, handing over his penknife to help cut the boats free from the roof of the officers quarters. They successfully loosed Collapsibles A, C, and D.

But as they worked frantically on Collapsible B, the bridge dipped; Gracie and his friend, who he had been with for most of the ordeal, moved toward the stern. Caught in the crowd of passengers, the water rushed up to meet them.

Colonel Gracie jumped with the wave and grabbed for the bottom rung of a ladder, and pulled himself onto the roof.

So the ship went down.

And Gracie with it.

Gracie grabbed a hold of a wooden crate and found his way to--of all lifeboats--Collapsible B, which had floated away upside down when Titanic's deck was submerged.

By Gracie's estimates, there were approximately a dozen men on top of the capsized boat when he managed to pull himself aboard, and about a dozen followed him. All in all, Gracie guessed there were about 30 on Collapsible B.

The boat was kept afloat by an air pocket that inevitably diminished as their weight bore down and the night wore on; multiple survivors speak of the water washing over them.

No one could move. And it was this precarious situation, as the lifeboat sank deeper, that caused the survivors on Collapsible B to deny other survivors who swam near.

Colonel Gracie turned his head away, lest he be begged and made to refuse. There are reports of men being beaten away with oars. And a report, supported by Gracie and another survivor, that a man who was told off replied with, "All right, boys; good luck, and God bless you."

With the morning came the swell of the sea, and the air pocket within leaked. Second Officer Lightoller, the ad hoc leader of Collapsible B and the highest-ranked officer to survive, arranged for the men to stand and shift their weights to counteract the swells.

By the time they were rescued, the water was up to their knees, and multiple men had died.

Colonel Gracie had to drag himself into Lifeboat 12 when they pulled up alongside Collapsible B. Per his account, there was a dead man in the boat, whose identity has never been determined. Gracie said that he tried desperately to revive him, but it was in vain.

On board Carpathia under a pile of blankets, Colonel Gracie found his body and legs had been cut; he had, it turned out, also sustained a wound to his head.

He was graciously nursed by other survivors, including Frederic and Daisy Spedden, as well as their son’s nursemaid Elizabeth Burns, who provided him with warm drinks. He made a point of thanking them in his manuscript.

Colonel Gracie testified in the resulting Senate Inquiry and set immediately to write a book about the sinking. It is, as you have seen, extraordinarily detailed. He spent a considerable amount of time performing research, curating peer survivor accounts, and determining who was in each lifeboat.

But however bombastic he seems in his writing, the truth is that Colonel Gracie’s vitality, if not his life, was lost to Titanic. He was a diabetic, and the hypothermia he suffered took a severe toll on his health.

At only 54 years old, Colonel Archibald Gracie died on December 4, 1912.

His final request was that he be interred in the same clothes he had worn when Titanic sank.

Colonel Gracie's funeral was widely reported. Multiple Titanic survivors were in mournful attendance, including Jack Thayer, a seventeen-year-old who had also survived the night on the back of Collapsible B.

Colonel Gracie’s last words were, “We must get them into the boats. We must get them all into the boats.”