A retired insurance executive volunteering at Britain's National Archives has discovered one of only 11 known surviving early printings of the US Declaration of Independence - the only one identified outside the United States. Michael Scurr, who has spent 11 years cataloguing historical papers at the Archives since retiring from the insurance industry, located the document last May attached to a Royal Navy captain's report on the capture of the American privateer Dalton on Christmas Eve 1776. The report listed an enclosure only as "another paper."
"I thought, oh, right, OK, this is definitely a Declaration of Independence. How exciting is this?" Scurr told the Associated Press after recognising the word "Declaration" printed across the top. Researchers have since dated the printing to Exeter, New Hampshire, between July 16 and 19, 1776 - days after the original document was signed.
The find opens three distinct angles relevant to the insurance market: how the UK state indemnifies its national collections, how specialist insurers value unique historical artefacts, and how the document's own capture connects to the origins of London's marine war risk market.
The National Archives, as an Exchequer-funded national institution, does not typically hold commercial insurance on its permanent collections. Items loaned between UK institutions are instead covered through the Government Indemnity Scheme, administered by Arts Council England on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which offers a state-backed alternative to commercial cover.
The scheme issued 757 indemnities in 2024-25, covering 26,433 cultural items with a combined value of £19.1 billion - saving museums and galleries £81 million compared with commercial insurance costs, according to Arts Council England. The Archives' Prize Papers, from which the Exeter printing emerged, are part of the government's own retained holdings, an example of the public sector self-insuring significant historical assets rather than transferring the risk commercially. Specialist fine art and heritage insurers in London remain involved in this space, particularly when national collections loan items abroad or borrow from private lenders.
The discovery also illustrates the valuation challenge specialist insurers face with unique historical artefacts. Comparable early Declaration printings give some indication of the values involved: a similarly rare July 1776 printing carried a pre-sale estimate of $2 million to $4 million at a Sotheby's auction in January 2025, while a July 11, 1776 newspaper-broadside hybrid sold for $3.36 million at Sotheby's in June 2024. For UK fine art and specialty insurers, those figures illustrate the difficulty of pricing cover for objects with no direct market comparator - the Exeter printing is the only example of its kind outside the United States, which means comparable sales data provides a floor rather than a value.
The circumstances of the document's capture connect directly to the origins of London's marine war risk market. The Dalton was an 18-gun privateer operating under the authority of the Continental Congress, chased for seven hours and captured off the coast of Portugal by Captain Thomas Fitzherbert aboard the 64-gun HMS Raisonnable. Privateering of this kind was precisely the war risk that London's marine underwriters, already coalescing around Lloyd's Coffee House by the 1770s, were pricing at the time. Vessels engaged in transatlantic trade during the Revolutionary War faced substantially elevated premiums to reflect the risk of capture - a direct precursor to the war risk and marine hull covers still written in the London market today.
Amanda Bevan, who leads the National Archives' project cataloguing Royal Navy correspondence from the American Revolution, said the find was "an amazing addition to the story of the Dalton and the many other privateers that fought the British at sea."
