Volunteer Finds Rare 1776 Declaration of Independence in UK Archive

Michael Scurr has spent eleven years of Thursday mornings at Britain's National Archives in Kew, cataloging the correspondence of 18th-century Royal Navy captains for researchers who haven't been born yet. Last May, one folder gave something back.

Attached to a captain's report on the capture of the American privateer Dalton on Christmas Eve 1776 was an enclosure logged only as "another paper." Scurr unfolded it and stopped at a single word printed across the top.

"I thought, oh, right, OK, this is definitely a Declaration of Independence. How exciting is this?"

Michael Scurr, National Archives volunteer, speaking to the Associated Press

The National Archives has since confirmed it: a rare early printing of the Exeter, New Hampshire edition of the Declaration of Independence, produced in mid-July 1776 to spread word of the break with Britain, one of just 11 copies known to survive and the only one outside the United States. The archive unveiled the find on Thursday, two days before the 250th anniversary of the document it copies.

The document's route to a filing box in West London says as much about the war as its wording does. It survived because the Royal Navy captured it. The 18-gun Dalton, a privateer sailing under authority the Continental Congress had granted through paperwork signed by its president, John Hancock, was run down over seven hours on Christmas Eve by Capt. Thomas Fitzherbert's 64-gun HMS Raisonnable and taken off the coast of Portugal. The Dalton's 120-man crew went to a prison in Plymouth. One of them, 19-year-old Charles Hebert, kept journals describing hunger, illness and repeated punishment across more than two years of captivity before a prisoner exchange freed him. Most survived.

Amanda Bevan, who leads the National Archives' project cataloging Royal Navy captains' correspondence from the Revolution, said the find corrects an imbalance in how the war gets remembered. Valley Forge's suffering is well documented; the Americans who went to sea to disrupt British trade against the world's dominant navy have had far less attention.

"They know why they're fighting, but this puts it in a language which makes it greater than them. They're not fighting because they're aggrieved in particular. They're fighting for an ideal. And I think that just to find the declaration in a theater of war where people are committing themselves to fight for their country on the wide ocean is really something special."

Amanda Bevan, The National Archives (UK)

Bevan believes the Dalton's captain would have read the declaration aloud to his crew, as was customary with official orders, meaning this particular copy likely did the job it was printed for before the Royal Navy ever touched it. That reading, if it happened, took place entirely at sea, aboard an American ship fighting Britain's navy without much of a navy of its own to speak of.

American historians are treating the discovery as more than a curiosity. Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions at Philadelphia's Museum of the American Revolution, called the copy a direct link to the moment news of independence first went out into the world.

"It's not just a document, it's an artifact," he said, describing the find as a tangible connection to 1776, "the baton being passed, in a way."

The newly identified copy will go on display in the National Archives' Revolution 250 exhibition, covering Britain's American colonies from 1763 through 1783. Skic's closing point is the one worth sitting with, 250 years on: "Even though 250 years has gone by, we still do not know everything about the American Revolution, and there are still finds left to be discovered."