Tulipomania (15 page)

These remarkable transactions, which took place in a part of the United Provinces that had been badly battered by a recession, were the first sign that something approaching a mania had begun to flourish. For three decades flower lovers had used money to buy tulips. Now—for the first time—tulips were being used as money. And just as strikingly, they were being valued at huge sums.

It is difficult to be certain how significant the sale of the tulip house was without knowing what sort of flowers were involved in the sale. But even though the price of homes in West Friesland might not have been high compared with those in Amsterdam, a decent-sized house within the walls of Hoorn would hardly have changed hands for less than five hundred guilders or so, and good-quality farmland would probably have been more expensive than that; the value of each bulb would therefore have been high by the standards of the time. It is true that bulb prices had been rising for some years before 1633, and some equally startling transactions of which no record has survived may have taken place in earlier years; it is also likely that if a farm really did change hands for some bulbs, the man who sold it was a connoisseur landowner who possessed many other properties and passed this one on to an equally wealthy acquaintance complete with a sitting tenant, rather than a farmer disposing of his only means of earning a living. Yet even so these transactions were on a much larger scale than anything that had taken place in the 1620s.

The flower trade was changing too. The bulbs that were bought and sold in the 1630s were not out-and-out rarities such as Semper Augustus, which could not be obtained for any sum, but other superbly fine varieties and, later, tulips of a lesser quality, most of which—
while available only in limited numbers—could be bought from professional growers who would sell them to anyone who could pay their prices. And as the number of people attracted to the bulb trade increased, the price of the most favored varieties began to rise: slowly at first, but more rapidly from the end of 1634. This acceleration continued through 1635 until, by the winter of 1636, the value of some bulbs could double in little more than a week.

The tulip mania climaxed in just two mad months: December 1636 and January 1637. In those few weeks people and money poured into the tulip trade as Dutchmen across the United Provinces rushed to invest whatever they possessed in bulbs. Naturally this sharp increase in demand pushed prices higher still. For a while at least, everyone made money. And that attracted yet more novice florists to the trade.

A contemporary chronicler gave some idea of the way prices rose. An Admirael de Man that had been bought for 15 guilders was resold for 175; one of the Bizarden, Gheel en Root van Leyde, increased in value twelvefold, from 45 guilders to a princely 550, and a Generalissimo tenfold, from 95 guilders to 900. The price of another superbly fine tulip, Generael der Generaelen van Gouda—the highly coveted “General of Generals,” a large flower with flaming scarlet stripes on a white ground whose unwieldy title was soon abbreviated, simply, to “Gouda”—rose by two-thirds between December 1634 and December 1635, then by a further 50 percent in the six months between December and May 1636. After that it tripled in value once again between June 1636 and January 1637, so that a bulb that was already expensive, priced at 100 guilders at the beginning of the boom, was worth no less than 750 just two years later.

Naturally the prices quoted for a single bulb of the most celebrated of all tulips, Semper Augustus, rose sharply too—from 5,500 guilders a bulb in 1633 to an astonishing 10,000 guilders in the first month of 1637. The last sum mentioned could have been afforded only by a few dozen people in the whole of the Dutch Republic. It
was enough to feed, clothe, and house a whole Dutch family for half a lifetime, or sufficient to purchase one of the grandest homes on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam for cash, complete with a coach house and an eighty-foot garden—and this at a time when homes in that city were as expensive as property anywhere in the world.

Such profits were startling, even in a country where the economy had recovered from the recession of the 1620s and it was possible once again for money to be made in every profession from spice dealing to soap boiling. Those who tried the bulb trade and profited from it could not resist telling their friends and family about the source of their good fortune; the novelty and the implausibility of making money from flowers ensured that their stories were told and retold—losing, it is certain, nothing in the process. By the end of 1634 or the beginning of 1635, lurid tales of the money to be made in tulips were the talk of Holland.

One such anecdote mentioned a piece of farmland on Schermer polder that changed hands for half a dozen flowers; another told of a man who was so addicted to the tulip trade that the woman he had planned to marry left him for another. A third story concerned a rich merchant from Amsterdam who was said to have purchased a fabulously rare Rosen bulb, which he put down for a moment on a counter in his warehouse. When he looked again, he discovered it had vanished, and his servants turned the place upside down in their search for the flower without success. Finally the merchant realized it must have been taken by a sailor—just returned from a three-year voyage to the East Indies and completely ignorant of the tulip craze—who had been in the warehouse at the time. He scoured Amsterdam for the man and eventually found him sitting on a coil of rope down at the docks and chewing on the last portions of the precious bulb, which he had mistaken for an onion. When the merchant realized what had happened, he had the sailor seized and thrown into prison. A fourth tale was told of an English traveler, similarly ignorant of tulips, who
used his pocketknife to dissect a bulb he found lying in the conservatory of his wealthy Dutch host. Unfortunately for him, it proved to be an Admirael van der Eijck (a Rosen variety adorned with exceptionally strong, straight bloodred stripes) worth no less than four thousand guilders. The inquisitive Englishman, too, soon found himself hauled before the magistrates and made to pay for his transgression. Or so the story went.

In truth, these and the welter of other anecdotes that circulated about the tulip trade were implausible at best, impossible at worst. Many were nothing more than common gossip, and the rest appear to have begun life as simple morality tales, spun perhaps in pulpits, which warned of the dangers of dealing in flowers. But if they were intended to deter people from dabbling in tulips, such tales of excess were anything but effective. They made bulbs seem desirable, profit certain. Excited talk about the money that could be made in the tulip trade drove more and more people to try it for themselves.

What made so many people, from so many different professions, so keen to try their luck in a trade of which almost all of them were completely ignorant? The lure of profit, certainly, and the prospect of making far more money than they had ever had before. It helped, too, that the United Provinces was just emerging from a lengthy recession—that lasted for most of the 1620s and was the worst of the entire seventeenth century—caused in part by the renewal of the war with Spain and the effects of a Spanish blockade. This depression was followed by an increasingly feverish boom in the Dutch economy as a whole, which began in 1631 or 1632 and gathered pace toward the end of the decade and meant that in many cases there was more money around than ever before. Much more local factors, however, also had an impact. Many of the weavers who were drawn to the bulb trade came from the town of Haarlem, a dozen miles to the west of Amsterdam, where even the general boom could not prevent the
linen business from falling into sharp decline as Leiden came to dominate the Dutch cloth industry.

Another influence was a severe outbreak of bubonic plague that exactly coincided with the tulip mania, striking many Dutch cities between 1633 and 1637. The chronicler Theodorus Schrevelius, who lived in Haarlem throughout this period, recorded that the disease killed eight thousand of his fellow citizens between its first appearance in October 1635 and its eventual disappearance in July 1637. Of these more than 5,700 died of plague while the bulb trade was close to its height between August and November 1636—one in eight of the total population of the city, so many that there were not graves enough to hold the dead. The appalling impact of the plague had two significant consequences. One was that it created a shortage of labor and thus resulted in a rise in wages as employers competed for manpower; this would have helped to create surplus income that could be plowed into the bulb trade. The other—or so it has been suggested—was to create a mood of fatalism and desperation among the traders themselves, which may have contributed to the abandon with which they dealt their bulbs.

Whether they were optimistic or fatalistic, the novice florists who did decide to try their luck in the tulip trade could hardly have hoped to possess a flower as valuable as a Gouda or an Admirael van der Eijck; they would have begun by buying and selling the cheapest available bulbs. The historian Simon Schama has suggested that newcomers were able to gain a foothold in what was already an expensive market because the professional growers happened to introduce an unusually large number of new varieties in 1634, which had the effect of depressing prices. There does not appear to be any direct evidence that this was the case, and anyway it was the newest—and thus scarcest—varieties that were generally also the most expensive. What seems more likely is that some of the older and more established
tulips had multiplied by this date to the point where they became generally available and modestly priced. It was by buying and selling these flowers that the newcomers must have entered the market.

Entering the tulip trade was simple. Investing in a few bulbs required having a little money and access to a nearby nursery but little else. In the first half of 1635, then, the market for bulbs began to flourish as never before throughout the United Provinces, springing up wherever tulips were readily available. Groups of florists emerged in every town where connoisseurs or growers were already well established: in Haarlem and Amsterdam; in Gouda and Rotterdam; in Utrecht and Delft, Leiden and Alkmaar; and in Enkhuizen, Medemblik, and Hoorn.

The growers and the connoisseurs did more than simply provide the newcomers with stock. The trade they had created was already ordered and established. There were no arcane laws to master, no complications to be overcome. The rules for buying and selling flowers were based on simple common sense, and they were well known and well accepted long before the first florists began dealing in tulips.

The earliest sales were probably by the bulb, but this changed as the number of available flowers increased, and it would appear that by 1610 some less valuable tulips were already being sold “by the bed,” a unit of exchange that does not seem to have been precisely defined. The legal archives of Haarlem contain the record of the sale, in 1611, of four beds of tulips planted by an apothecary called Joos to one Jan Brants, who paid the already considerable sum of two hundred guilders. The next year Brants bought two more beds of tulips that belonged jointly to a certain Dammis Pietersz. and a Haarlem brewer named Augustijn Steyn. They cost him another 450 guilders.

Sometime after that (when is not clear) it became possible to buy and sell offsets as well as mother bulbs. This was an obvious next step, because logic dictated that offsets, which after all would soon become bulbs themselves, must be worth something in their own right. Nevertheless,
this extension to the trade was fraught with difficulty because it was impossible to guarantee that offsets would mature satisfactorily or, as we have seen, that the tulips they produced would be identical to those of the mother bulb. Because of these problems, trading in offsets was something of a risk, and the idea took some time to win favor. When, in the spring of 1611, a Haarlem connoisseur named Andries Mahieu was asked if he would sell a linen merchant of his acquaintance some offshoots, he replied by asking his friend if he really wanted to buy “a cat in a bag.” This statement so imprinted itself in the mind of one bystander, the gardener Marten de Fort, that it survived to be recorded in the legal archives too.

Trading offsets was significant for another reason. Clusius and the other early growers already knew that bulbous plants prosper best if they are lifted from the soil soon after the flowers of one season have fallen, then are dried off and preserved aboveground until autumn. The buying and selling of bulbs therefore occurred only during the summer months when the tulips were out of the ground and could be physically exchanged. Offsets, on the other hand, mature only over a period of several years, so it was tempting to sell them when they first appeared.

Dealing in offsets was the first step to liberating the tulip trade from its traditional dependence on the calendar. Some of the buying and selling that had previously been crammed into no more than four months could now be spread throughout the year. By itself the sale of the odd offset a few months before it was actually ready to be separated from its mother bulb posed no threat to the stability of the tulip trade. But it set a dangerous precedent, and as more and more florists came flooding into the market, the pressure to make tulip dealing a year-round affair only grew.

A trading season that ran only from June until September made perfect sense to the connoisseurs, who preferred to see a plant in flower before they considered buying it and wanted to complete all
their purchases for the year in time for the bulbs to be returned to the flower bed. But it was highly limiting for the new breed of tulip dealers. Because they generally had no interest in cultivating their bulbs, the old distinctions between the growing season and the lifting season meant little to the florists, who took less pleasure than their predecessors in the physical beauty of the tulip and more in its potential to earn them money. The newcomers wanted to wring as much profit from their flowers as they could, and while a handful may have appreciated the benefits of planting the bulbs and making money from their offsets, most were far more interested in buying tulips simply to resell them.