Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 13, 2026

Catalogued as Another Paper for Two Hundred and Fifty Years

A volunteer working through eighteenth-century Admiralty records at Kew opened a file listed only as another paper and found one of eleven known Exeter broadsides of the Declaration of Independence, printed by Robert Luist Fowle between the sixteenth and nineteenth of July 1776. Michael Scurr made the identification in May. The sheet had been carried aboard the American privateer Dalton, seized off Portugal by HM Raisonable on Christmas Eve that year, and filed with the prize papers ever since. It is the only Exeter broadside known outside the United States.

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Exeter broadside, printed July 1776
Exeter broadside, printed July 1776
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