Previously Unidentified Original Declaration of Independence Discovered in UK Royal Navy Archives

A rare Declaration of Independence captured from an American Privateer by a Royal Navy warship on Christmas Eve 1776 has been discovered in a British archive, and is now one of only 11 of its type known to survive.

A volunteer at Britain’s National Archives in Kew Gardens, London, discovered a previously unknown copy of the Declaration of Independence while cataloguing long-sealed bundles of documents. The Brit was working on an America-250 project to sort and catalogue large volumes of documents relating to British naval captains and admirals who served around 1776.

The National Archives states that the volunteer, Michael Scurr, was going through letters sent by Thomas Fitzherbert, captain of HMS Raisonable, in May 2026, and that the document, until then, was listed only as an anonymous “another paper”.

The Declaration is one of those printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, between July 16 and 19, 1776 and is now one of only 11 known to survive, and the only Exeter Declaration held outside of the United States.

It is now known that the Declaration was passed into the British archives because it was among papers taken from Captain Eleazar Johnson of the American privateer Dalton, a 20-gun brig out of New England carrying a hand-signed commission from Continental Congress President John Hancock, authorising the ship to “attack, seize, and take the Ships and other Veffels belonging to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain”.

The Dalton had sailed to the coast of Portugal — an important British ally — to harry British trade, but surrendered after a seven-hour chase with Captain Fitzherbert’s HMS Raisonnable, a 64-gun third rate, on New Year’s Eve 1776.

Captain Fitzherbert evidently didn’t appreciate the significance of the Declaration, and it was filed away and forgotten, the papers eventually passing into the National Archives hundreds of years later.

The officers and crew of the Dalton were imprisoned in England, and its captain led several attempts to escape, including digging a significant tunnel. The National Archives records that one of the crew who kept a diary in captivity wrote of their time trying to dig out of the prison:

A great quantity of dirt has already come out of this hole, and we have much trouble in concealing it. We have filled every hole and corner in the prison where we can with safety hide it, and a great many large stones are laid fore and aft the prison, in piles, under our hammocks, with old garments laid over them.

The bid was unsuccessful, and the crew were later released in a prisoner exchange.

The Dalton Declaration is now the fourth held by the British National Archives, and the rarest. The other three are so-called Dunlap Broadsides, the first printing of the Declaration of Independence printed overnight on July 4th 1776.

The British Archive’s third Dunlap was only discovered in 2009 and is presently on loan to the Museum of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania.