The paper had been folded for nearly two and a half centuries when Michael Scurr, a retired insurance executive, opened it in the hushed reading rooms of Britain’s National Archives. He had been cataloguing the letters of an 18th-century Royal Navy captain, a Thursday-morning ritual he had kept for eleven years, when he came across an enclosure attached to a report on the capture of an American privateer. The inventory described it simply as “another paper.” As he unfolded the brittle sheet, the word “Declaration” appeared across the top. “I thought, oh, right, OK, this is definitely a Declaration of Independence,” he later recalled. “How exciting is this?”

What Scurr had found was a copy of the so-called Exeter printing, produced in New Hampshire between 16 and 19 July 1776, just days after the original was signed in Philadelphia. It is one of only eleven such copies known to survive, and the sole example identified outside the United States. The document had been seized on Christmas Eve 1776, when the 64-gun HMS Raisonnable, after a seven-hour chase off the coast of Portugal, captured the Dalton, an 18-gun privateer sailing under the authority of the Continental Congress. The Dalton’s papers — including its commission signed by John Hancock and this very declaration — were bundled into the captain’s correspondence and eventually deposited in the state archive, where they lay unremarked for generations.

Viewed from London, the discovery illuminates a little-examined theatre of the American Revolution: the privateers who took the fight to sea. Amanda Bevan, who leads the National Archives’ project to catalogue Royal Navy captains’ letters from the period, believes the declaration was not merely bureaucratic cargo. It was likely read aloud to the crew, she suggests, transforming a privateering voyage into a mission of ideals. “They’re not fighting because they’re aggrieved in particular,” Bevan said. “They’re fighting for an ideal.” The document, in her reading, gave the men aboard the Dalton a language larger than themselves — a purpose set down on a single sheet of paper that travelled across the Atlantic.

In the United States, the find has resonated with a similar sense of immediacy. Matthew Skic, director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, described the copy as “a tangible connection to the past,” an artefact that links directly to the captain who carried news of independence across the ocean. The National Archives in Kew, which already holds three of the original Dunlap broadsides printed in Philadelphia on the night of 4 July 1776, has now conserved the Exeter copy, repairing a slight tear and stabilising the paper. It will go on display as part of an exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, a quiet object that once moved through a world of cannon fire and winter seas.

Saul Nassé, chief executive of the National Archives, called the find “a vanishingly rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence, found not in America, but here in the UK.” For Scurr, the moment of recognition was visceral. He felt butterflies in his stomach, he told the BBC, and called over his supervisor: “I think you need to come and have a look at this.” The document, now stabilised and safe for handling, still carries the faint creases of its long concealment — a folded message from a young republic, intercepted at sea and held in silence until a volunteer’s patient hands opened it again.