LONDON — Just in time for America’s 250th birthday, a remarkably rare copy of the Declaration of Independence has surfaced in a London archive — hidden for nearly 250 years among paperwork from a captured American ship.
The document had been sitting in Britain’s National Archives, buried in files related to the British seizure of an American privateer vessel in 1776. For centuries, 18th century records had described it simply as “another document” — until a volunteer took a second look this past May.
“Unearthing and handling such a significant historical document has been thrilling, particularly in this important anniversary year,” said Michael Scurr, the volunteer who made the discovery while working on a cataloguing project.
The announcement came on Friday, the day before the United States marked its semiquincentennial — 250 years since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence from Britain on July 4, 1776.
In those early revolutionary days, printers sympathetic to the cause rushed to reproduce the founding document and spread it as widely as possible throughout the American colonies. The copy found in London was printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, in mid-July 1776, making it the 11th known surviving copy of what are called the “Exeter Declarations” — and the first ever discovered outside the United States.
The document’s journey to England is a story of war and misfortune. Eleazer Johnson, captain of a ship called the Dalton, picked up the copy later that same year before setting sail across the Atlantic. His mission was to intercept and capture British vessels, and historians believe he may have brought the declaration along to inspire his crew to fight for their new nation.
That mission came to an abrupt end on December 24, 1776, when the Royal Navy captured the Dalton off the coast of Portugal. The ship and everything aboard it were brought back to Plymouth, in southwest England.
The National Archives noted that this makes the document the only known copy of the declaration to have been taken through military force.
Under the rules of the time, British naval captains were required to hand over all documents from any ship they captured in order to claim their share of the prize — a bureaucratic requirement that, centuries later, proved to be a historical goldmine.
“Thanks to the bureaucratic processes of war … we can present an unusually rich backstory that most surviving declarations do not have,” said Graham Moore, a curator at the National Archives.
Given that Britain seized roughly 3,600 ships during the American Revolutionary War, the National Archives holds an enormous collection of records that historians are still working to fully explore.
