The Declaration of Independence the British Captured—and Accidentally Preserved
For nearly 250 years, an extraordinarily rare copy of the Declaration of Independence sat folded among British naval records.
It had not been purchased by a collector or presented as a diplomatic gift. It had been taken during wartime from an American ship. A British naval officer forwarded it to London, where it was described simply as “another paper.”
That almost meaningless description helped the document disappear into the archives.
It remained there until May 2026, when a longtime volunteer opened the file and realized that the paper captured by the British on Christmas Eve in 1776 was one of the earliest surviving printings of America’s founding document.
A discovery hidden inside an ordinary file
Michael Scurr, a retired insurance executive, had volunteered at Britain’s National Archives for 11 years. He spent his Thursday mornings cataloging correspondence written by Royal Navy captains during the American Revolution.
The work was part of a project connected to the 250th anniversary of American independence. Most of the material consisted of reports, letters and administrative records generated by Britain’s enormous wartime bureaucracy.
Then Scurr opened a file associated with the capture of an American privateer named the Dalton.
Attached to the naval report was an enclosure identified only as “another paper.” When Scurr carefully unfolded it, the prominent word “Declaration” caught his attention. He had found a contemporary printing of the Declaration of Independence that historians did not know had survived.
The discovery was remarkable not only because of the document’s rarity, but because its journey could be traced almost completely—from a printing press in New Hampshire to the deck of an American privateer and finally into the files of the British Admiralty.
This was not the signed parchment
The document displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., is the engrossed parchment bearing the delegates’ signatures. The paper discovered in Britain is something different.
It is a broadside: a large, single sheet printed for public distribution.
After the Continental Congress approved the Declaration on July 4, 1776, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap produced the first printed copies overnight. Those broadsides were sent to state governments and military commanders. As the text traveled through the colonies, local printers reproduced it in newspapers and on their own broadsides so that Americans could hear or read what Congress had declared.
The newly discovered sheet was printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, sometime between July 16 and July 19, 1776. These versions are now known as the Exeter Declarations.
Before the British discovery, only 10 copies of this printing were known to survive. The newly identified sheet became the 11th—and the only known Exeter copy located outside the United States. Britain’s National Archives also describes it as the only surviving copy of the Declaration known to have been seized through military action.
The Loyalist who printed the Declaration
The printer associated with the Exeter broadside was Robert Luist Fowle, publisher of the New Hampshire Gazette or Exeter Morning Chronicle.
Fowle was an unusual person to reproduce a document announcing America’s separation from Britain. Historical research indicates that he leaned toward the Loyalist cause while his uncle and former business partner, Daniel Fowle, supported the Revolution.
Robert Fowle apparently kept his political sympathies quiet while operating his Exeter press. In 1777, he was accused of involvement in counterfeiting paper currency. He escaped before his case was resolved and fled behind British lines. Years later, he returned to Exeter while continuing to receive a Loyalist pension from the Crown.
That means one of the most revolutionary texts in American history was printed in New Hampshire by a man who would eventually seek British protection.
The Exeter printing even contains small clues to its hurried production. On surviving examples, the name of congressional secretary Charles Thomson appears incorrectly as “Charles Thompson.” An earlier state of the broadside also misspelled John Hancock as “Hacock,” although that error was corrected in later sheets.
The Declaration goes to sea
How this particular broadside came into the possession of Captain Eleazar Johnson is not known with certainty.
Johnson commanded the Dalton, an 18-gun privateer sailing from Newburyport, Massachusetts. Unlike pirates, American privateers operated under government authorization. Privately owned ships received commissions allowing them to capture British vessels and cargo, providing badly needed support for the small Continental Navy.
The Dalton left Newburyport on November 15, 1776, and stopped in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, before beginning its Atlantic mission. It may have been during that stop that Johnson obtained the Exeter broadside.
Historians have suggested that the Declaration may have been read to the crew. Captains customarily read their official orders aloud, and the document could have reminded the sailors that they were not merely pursuing prizes. They were sailing under the authority of a new country whose continued existence was far from certain. No surviving record proves exactly how Johnson used the broadside, but its presence aboard a fighting vessel gives it a connection to the Revolution that few other copies possess.
A seven-hour chase on Christmas Eve
On December 24, 1776, the Dalton was sailing roughly 250 miles west of Portugal when it encountered HMS Raisonnable, a 64-gun British warship commanded by Captain Thomas Fitzherbert.
The British ship gave chase.
For approximately seven hours, the smaller American privateer attempted to escape. By evening, Johnson could no longer avoid capture.
Before surrendering, he began throwing the ship’s papers into the Atlantic. Logs and crew lists could provide the British with information about the vessel’s activities and the identities of the men aboard. Johnson reportedly destroyed nearly all of them.
But he kept three printed documents:
His privateering commission, his orders from the Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence.
Why he chose to save those three papers remains unknown.
Perhaps he needed the commission to demonstrate that he was a lawful combatant rather than a pirate. Perhaps the papers represented the legitimacy of his mission. Whatever his reasoning, Johnson preserved the one item that might seem most dangerous to carry onto a British warship: a printed declaration that accused King George III of tyranny and announced that the colonies no longer owed allegiance to the Crown.
The British boarded the Dalton, seized the papers and took approximately 120 crew members prisoner.
The sailors’ ordeal did not end at sea
The captured crew was taken to Plymouth, England, where the men faced hunger, sickness and imprisonment.
One of the sailors, 19-year-old Charles Herbert of Newburyport, kept a diary describing the capture and the years that followed. His writings record the prisoners’ treatment, punishments, illnesses and attempts to escape. Herbert remained a prisoner for more than two years before eventually being released through a prisoner exchange.
His account gives a human dimension to the Declaration found aboard the Dalton. The broadside carried language about liberty while the young men who had transported it across the Atlantic were confined as prisoners of the nation from which America had declared itself independent.
How British bureaucracy preserved an American treasure
Captured vessels were valuable. To claim a share of a seized ship and its cargo, Royal Navy officers had to provide documentation proving that the capture was lawful.
This created an enormous paper trail.
During the Revolutionary War, Britain seized approximately 3,600 vessels. Their confiscated logs, commissions, letters and crew records passed through official processes and, in many cases, eventually entered government archives.
The Dalton’s Declaration appears to have taken an unusual route. Rather than disappearing into routine prize-court records, it was forwarded with Captain Fitzherbert’s correspondence to Admiralty officials in London.
There, someone referred to it only as “another paper.”
That description concealed its importance from generations of archivists and researchers. Yet the oversight may also have saved it. Because the Declaration remained folded with the naval correspondence, its connection to the Dalton was preserved.
Most surviving copies of early Declaration printings have incomplete histories. They may appear in family collections or auctions without a complete record of who first possessed them. This copy is different. British paperwork documents when, where and under what circumstances it was captured.
The twist of fate
The survival of the Dalton Declaration depended on a remarkable sequence of decisions.
A printer believed to sympathize with Britain printed a document declaring independence from Britain.
An American captain threw most of his ship’s papers into the ocean but refused to destroy this one.
A British officer captured the Declaration but preserved it rather than discarding it as enemy propaganda.
An archivist described it so vaguely that its significance was forgotten.
Finally, nearly 250 years later, a volunteer unfolded it just as the United States was preparing to commemorate the Declaration’s 250th anniversary.
Had any part of that sequence changed, the broadside might have vanished.
Captain Johnson could have thrown it into the Atlantic. The document could have been damaged during the capture, separated from the naval report or discarded after the prize proceedings. Instead, it survived in the archives of the very government it denounced.
The country America broke away from became the accidental guardian of one of the papers that announced that separation.
Sometimes history survives because people understand the importance of what they are holding.
And sometimes it survives because, through an extraordinary twist of fate, they do not.
Sources and Further Reading
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