Michael Scurr found copies of a rare early Declaration of Independence while cataloging letters at Britain’s National Archives last May. He unfolded the paper and realized it was the Exeter printing, one of 11 original copies known to exist.
The document had been attached to a report on the capture of the Dalton on Christmas Eve 1776. The National Archives unveiled the find on Thursday ahead of the 250th anniversary of American independence.
UK National Archives in London
Scurr was volunteering at the UK National Archives in London when he came across the paper among 18th-century Royal Navy correspondence. “I thought, oh, right, OK, this is definitely a Declaration of Independence,” he said after unfolding it. “How exciting is this?”
The copy was printed just days after the original was signed on July 4, 1776, and the Exeter printing was produced in Exeter, New Hampshire, from July 16 to 19, 1776. The archives said this is the only known Exeter printing identified outside the United States.
Dalton and the Royal Navy
Amanda Bevan said the Dalton was under the direction of the recently formed Continental Congress, with orders signed by John Hancock. The Dalton was an 18-gun privateer, and Captain Thomas Fitzherbert chased it for seven hours on Christmas Eve 1776 before capturing it off the coast of Portugal aboard the 64-gun HMS Raisonnable.
The ship’s 120-man crew was then imprisoned in Plymouth, England, under harsh conditions. Charles Hebert was 19 when he was captured, and journals he kept for more than two years described hunger, illness and repeated punishment.
Exeter printing in British papers
Bevan, who leads the project to catalog Royal Navy captains’ correspondence, said, “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.”
The document’s path now runs from a ship taken in wartime to a file preserved in Britain, and then to a cataloging table where a volunteer spotted it. That leaves the document as a newly identified example of American independence preserved in London, with its survival tied to the capture papers of the Dalton and the records of the Royal Navy.
