THE SUMS INVOLVED—like the $11,260 paid for a single dry biscuit from Shackleton's 1914–16 trans-Antarctic expedition—can make you wonder if the world has gone nuts. And there are people who think these prices are not just bizarre, but harmful, since they usually guarantee that the best stuff ends up in private hands rather than inside museums.

"It's a bad idea," says Jeff Blumenfeld, editor and publisher of Expedition News, a monthly newsletter for the adventure industry. "It's like cherry-picking the Titanic. When you have these expeditions and you break them up, you have no context that tells a complete story. To cannibalize these things and spread them to the winds is wrong."

Christie's response is simple: It's a free world, and the owners of these artifacts can sell them wherever they choose. To protect purchasers, Christie's does plenty of advance research on origins. The Lawrence items came from the family of a man named Corporal Albert "Taffy" Evans, who supposedly was Lawrence's unofficial chauffeur at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The compass, watch, and cigarette case—sold by the family to a private collector in 2003—were said to be a gift to Evans from Lawrence, who had the cigarette case inscribed with this message: "I leave to my dear friend Taffy my compass which saw me safely across a wilderness so that he may occasionally know where he is going!"

Casting doubt on all this is British writer Jeremy Wilson, author of Lawrence of Arabia, a widely respected biography published in 1989. Wilson says he saw the sale catalog online in early September, posted a "caveat emptor" message about the items at an online forum for Lawrence scholars, and sent a similar warning to Christie's. Wilson noted that he had never heard of Evans, that Lawrence didn't smoke, and that Lawrence didn't start styling himself as "T.E."—the name embossed on the leather compass case—until 1923.

Lambourn notes that Wilson did not raise these concerns when the objects were displayed at the Imperial War Museum in 2005, but he hastens to add that Christie's is taking the possibility of fakery quite seriously and will cancel the transaction if the items don't check out. "The current concerns are enough to merit further research before we can conclude the sale," Lambourn explained in an e-mail in November. "We are therefore trying to find out more about Evans, and have a lead with another collector who has another Lawrence relic with Evans provenance, with, apparently, more corroborative information on Evans and his role as Lawrence's driver in Paris.

"If we are able to find evidence of Evans' role... Wilson has agreed to review his currently skeptical view of the lot," Lambourn continued. "So, in summary, watch this space."