Rare Declaration of Independence Copy Found at UK National Archives

A rare copy of the American Declaration of Independence has been discovered at the UK's National Archives ahead of the 250th anniversary of its signing.

The document, which was seized by the Royal Navy after the capture of the privateer ship Dalton on Christmas Eve in 1776, was found during a cataloguing project looking at the navy's captains’ papers from the American Revolutionary War.

Graham Moore, the Revolution 250 curator at the National Archives, said the "exceptional" item was "one of the rarest forms of the Declaration we know about".

"What makes this discovery even more exceptional is that, as the only known copy taken by military action, we know much more about it – thanks to the bureaucratic processes of war," Moore said.

According to the National Archives, the Royal Navy ship HMS Raisonable pursued the Dalton for seven hours off the coast of Portugal before capturing it and taking it back to Britain.

The Declaration of Independence is one of the US's founding documents, outlining why Britain's Thirteen Colonies declared themselves to be independent sovereign states.

While there is only one copy of the original engrossed and signed declaration, which is housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., printer John Dunlap is thought to have produced around 200 printed copies for distribution. There are 26 known surviving copies of the Dunlap broadside today.

"This is an extraordinary discovery. It's a vanishingly rare surviving copy of the Declaration of Independence, found not in America, but here in the UK," Saul Nassé, chief executive of the National Archives, said of the recent UK find.

"Preserved in our state records, it's a powerful reminder that the history of the American Revolution is fundamentally transatlantic," Nassé added.