For volunteer Michael Scurr, it was “just a boring old Thursday morning” when he sat down in late May to catalogue an uncatalogued volume of 18th-century Royal Navy correspondence at the National Archives in Kew. But as he unfolded a document, he recognised the opening words: “In Congress, July 4, 1776. A declaration by the representatives of the United States of America …”
Scurr felt butterflies in his stomach. “I called over to my boss and said, ‘I think you need to come and have a look at this’,” he recalled. The discovery was a “vanishingly rare” copy of an early printing of the US Declaration of Independence – one of only 11 surviving copies of the so-called Exeter printing, and the only one known outside the United States.
“Volunteer Michael Scurr found a rare Exeter printing of the US Declaration of Independence at the National Archives.”
The modest sheet of paper was printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, between 16 and 19 July 1776, intended to spread news of American independence through the colonies. But it never reached its audience. The document was seized by the Royal Navy on Christmas Eve 1776, when HMS Raisonable captured the American privateer vessel Dalton off the coast of Portugal after a seven-hour pursuit. The Dalton’s papers – including the ship’s commission signed by Continental Congress president John Hancock – were brought back to Britain in January 1777 and later moved to Whitehall. The declaration, however, was listed without distinction as “another paper” by Captain Thomas Fitzherbert and lay hidden in state archives for centuries.
Dr Graham Moore, a records specialist at the National Archives, said the discovery is “one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about”. He added that because the broadsides were “designed to be printed quickly, distributed fast, and read and consumed by as many people as possible”, surviving copies are exceptionally rare. Moore noted that this copy is the only one known to have been taken by military action.
Saul Nassé, chief executive of the National Archives, praised the find as “an extraordinary discovery”. “It’s a vanishingly rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence, found not in America, but here in the UK,” he said.
Scurr, who had to keep the discovery secret from fellow volunteers, friends and family, described the moment he opened the paper as “a really thrilling moment”. The document has undergone restoration and is now on display in the archives’ Revolution 250 exhibition, which opened last month – just weeks before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing.