The copy of the ‘Exeter Declaration’ found at The National Archives.Photo credit: The National Archives
A volunteer sorting old Royal Navy papers at The National Archives in London has uncovered a rare 1776 printing of the US Declaration of Independence, found among letters sent by a British captain after capturing an American privateer ship. The document is one of only 11 surviving copies printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, and is now the only known example outside the United States. Discovered in May 2026 by volunteer Michael Scurr while cataloguing Admiralty correspondence, the fragile broadside had travelled across the Atlantic as wartime evidence before resting quietly in a box of 18th-century naval letters for more than two centuries, according to The National Archives. The Declaration of Independence was first adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 4 July 1776. One of these printers was Robert Luist Fowle in Exeter, New Hampshire, who produced a small run of the text between 16 and 19 July 1776 for his newspaper, the New Hampshire Gazette or Exeter Morning Chronicle. The story of how this particular copy reached London begins with an American privateer named Dalton, a 20-gun brigantine commissioned by the Continental Congress to attack British shipping. In late 1776, the Dalton sailed from Newburyport, Massachusetts, with a mixed crew of about 120 men, including Americans, English, Irish, Scottish, French and Danish sailors, as well as at least one Black crew member, Daniel Cottle.
In the days that followed, printers across the Thirteen Colonies rushed to produce their own editions, spreading the news of independence as widely as possible. During a stop on the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire, someone on board, most likely an officer, acquired a freshly printed Exeter Declaration. Under British naval practice at the time, all papers found on a captured enemy ship had to be seized and presented to a prize court to determine whether the vessel and its cargo legally belonged to the enemy. The lieutenant acting as prize-captain swore that the only documents taken from the Dalton were its privateering commission and instructions from Congress. We now know that was not the full story.
From that point, the document remained within British government records, passing from the Admiralty to the Public Record Office and finally to The National Archives, where it lay unnoticed until 2026. The America 250 initiative, building on earlier work to catalogue Royal Navy captains’ letters from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, created the conditions for this discovery.
That “other paper” was the Exeter Declaration. Captain Fitzherbert kept the Declaration for himself. He made copies of the Dalton’s commission and instructions and sent those to the Admiralty Secretary in Whitehall, along with a brief note mentioning signals and “another paper. By singling it out for immediate dispatch, Fitzherbert seems to have recognised its significance, even if Britain did not yet acknowledge the United States as a sovereign nation. Herbert’s account reveals how the ideals of the Declaration played out in the lives of ordinary people. These men had volunteered to serve on a ship authorised by the Continental Congress, many of them attacking the shipping of their own nations of birth. Some were free Black sailors, others were immigrants or transient workers drawn into the conflict by opportunity, ideology or circumstance. Their experiences of capture, imprisonment and eventual release form a human counterpoint to the grand political claims of the document they carried. For historians of the American Revolution, the Exeter Declaration in London is more than a rare printing. It is a physical trace of how the ideas of independence travelled across the Atlantic, carried on a privateer ship, captured by the Royal Navy and filed within British government records as evidence in a prize case. The document’s presence in Admiralty papers underscores how intertwined British and American histories were during the war, even as the two sides fought to define their future relationship. The find also highlights the continuing importance of archival cataloguing and volunteer-led projects. Without systematic attention to these boxes of correspondence, the Declaration might have remained hidden for decades more.