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.
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