A rare copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered in London. The document was found among archives containing papers from the British capture of an American privateer ship in 1776.
The text, which proclaims “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” had previously been listed as just another document in 18th-century records. Michael Scurr, a volunteer at Britain’s National Archives, made the discovery while working on a cataloguing project.
This significant historical find was announced on Friday, the day before Americans celebrate their semiquincentennial Declaration of Independence from Britain. In 1776, July 4 marked when Congress adopted the declaration as the American colonies were swept up in revolutionary fervor and printers rushed to reproduce it widely.
The copy found in London was printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, in mid-July 1776 and is the 11th surviving version of the so-called “Exeter Declarations,” being the first outside the United States. Eleazer Johnson, captain of the Dalton ship, took a copy before sailing across the Atlantic to seize British vessels.
On December 24, 1776, off Portugal’s coast, the Royal Navy captured the Dalton and its documents, taking them back to Plymouth, southwest England. The National Archives states this is the only known Declaration of Independence taken by military action.
Graham Moore, a curator at the National Archives, explained that due to wartime bureaucracy all British captains had to present their seized ship’s documents for authorities in order to claim their share of the prize. Given Britain seized 3,600 ships during the American Revolutionary War, historians have a vast and fertile ground to uncover histories like this one.