Peter Thompson

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Peter Thompson | William Bullock's "Strange Adventure": A Plan to Transform Seventeenth-Century Virginia | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Notes and Documents

William Bullock's "Strange Adventure": A Plan to Transform Seventeenth-Century Virginia

In Virginia Impartially Examined (1649), a tract written to urge seventeenth-century Virginians to diversify their economy and reform their government, William Bullock remarked in passing: "what a strange Adventure that man runnes, that puts himselfe in Print, he is sure to be judged without hearing." The copy of Bullock's pamphlet held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, confirms this expectation, for it is embellished with extensive marginalia written in a single, relatively neat, seventeenth-century hand. Some of the handwritten comments that pepper the margins of the printed text are fairly brief—for example, "very trew," "witty but not sollide nor true," and "you are much deseived"—and others fill all the free space available on a particular page. Whoever wrote these comments read the text closely, and often critically, just as Bullock had envisaged. ¹

The Bodleian Library's catalogue suggests that William Bullock was born around 1617. His father was Hugh Bullock, captain of the ship Indeavour. Hugh Bullock developed a number of interests outside shipping. Sometime before 1623 he financed the construction of the Dungeness lighthouse in the county of Kent, England, and in 1628 he received from the crown a monopoly granting him the exclusive right to employ an "engine" for the squaring of timber, of his own design, in Great Britain, Ireland, Virginia, and the Caribbean. Hugh Bullock settled in Virginia sometime between 1626 and 1628. He was appointed to the Governor's Council soon afterward. He had left Virginia by 1639, at which time his estate in Warwick County exceeded 5,000 acres. ² From remarks made in Virginia Impartially Examined it seems that William Bullock administered and attempted to augment this Virginia estate even before his father's death, which can have been no later than 1650. By his account, he lost several thousand pounds worth of investment in the process. ³ In 1649, William Bullock directed prospective emigrants to treat with him at the Middle Temple, one of London's Inns of Court, although he seems to have lodged rather than practiced there. Samuel Hartlib described him as being of the "royal interest and design." Little else is know about his background. ⁴

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