Tulipomania (21 page)

The auction at Alkmaar was the supreme moment of the tulip mania. The crowd attracted to the sale seems to have been a cut or two above the general hoi polloi of the taverns, and almost certainly the bidders would not have been permitted to get away with college practices such as offering part payment in kind. This was an auction for connoisseurs and affluent dealers. Real bulbs were being sold on a large scale for cash.

Even before the proceedings began, one determined buyer had contrived to negotiate privately with the regents of the orphanage for the jewel of Winkel’s collection, the Violetten Admirael van Enkhuizen. When this tulip had been lifted the previous summer, the mother bulb was found to have grown a small offset, which promised to become a viable bulb itself in the new year. The presence of this offset substantially increased the value of the already rare bulb, and the regents sold it for an astonishing 5,200 guilders, close to the price that had been quoted for a Semper Augustus in 1636. The same wealthy buyer also purchased two of the increasingly popular lilac-flamed Brabansons for 3,200 guilders the pair, and a miscellaneous lot that appears to have consisted of some more rare tulips and Winkel’s collection of lilies, carnations, and anemones. For these flowers the buyer paid an additional 12,467 guilders—a staggering total, for this one sale alone, of more than 21,000 guilders, enough to buy not one but two large houses on the Kaisersgracht in Amsterdam.

The lucrative private sale of these few bulbs set the tone for the auction that now began. The buyers appear to have been convinced, either by the tulip book or by Winkel’s reputation, that the flowers were of the highest quality and that this was a rare opportunity to acquire some of the most sought-after tulips in the United Provinces. They bid fiercely, and the prices achieved at Alkmaar were, with few exceptions, the highest ever recorded for the various tulips on sale.

Most of the best lots were concentrated at the beginning of the auction. The first, a 563-ace bulb of a middle-ranking variety called Boterman, sold for 263 guilders, about half a guilder per ace, but the next, a tiny Scipio of only 82 aces, was knocked down for 400 guilders—five guilders an ace. A Paragon van Delft sold for 605 guilders, then Winkel’s prized Bruyn Purper, a subtle flower that mixed a hint of brown into its lilac flares, went for 2,025, which was six guilders seven stuivers per ace.

So it went on, bulb after bulb attaining record prices. Only two of the seventy main lots that went under the hammer in the first part of the auction sold for less than a hundred guilders, and nineteen tulips were valued at more than a thousand guilders each. The most expensive bulbs were two good-sized Viceroys of 658 and 410 aces, which sold for 4,203 and 3,000 guilders respectively, but in terms of value per ace the most coveted flower was a Rosen of the variety Admirael Liefkens. This bulb, when planted, weighed a mere 59 aces, which made it the lightest tulip (bar one) to be sold that day. It can have been little more than an offset, but it cost its buyer 1,015 guilders, which is seventeen guilders four stuivers per ace.

Even the cheaper piece goods that were sold at the end of the day—after all the superbly fine tulips had found buyers—attained good prices. Five hundred aces of Violetten Rotgans were sold for 805 guilders and for 725 to another, and a thousand aces’ worth of bulbs produced by Jan Casteleijn, a Haarlem grower who had a garden on the south side of the Campeslaen, was knocked down for a thousand guilders.

Even before the auction had finally drawn to an end, it must have been obvious to those watching the bidding that Wouter Winkel’s bulbs were going for sums that were staggering even by the standards of the tulip mania. In addition to the 21,467 guilders raised in the earlier private sale, the seventy individual tulips auctioned at the Nieuwe Schutters-Doelen were sold for a combined total of 52,923 guilders
and bulbs of the twenty-two varieties sold by the thousand aces went for a further 15,610. The total for the whole auction and the private sale combined came to a round 90,000 guilders.

In the space of an hour or two, the Winkel children had gone from poor orphans to exceptionally rich young men and women. We know nothing about how the money raised at the auction was collected and what commissions, deductions, and tax may have been payable on this fantastic windfall. But if each of Winkel’s seven offspring simply took one-seventh of the gross sum, they would have received almost thirteen thousand guilders each, more than forty times the annual income of a typical artisan family. An ambitious boy could take that money and buy his way into almost any profession he cared to enter. A cautious one, living modestly, needed never do a day’s work in his life. And any girl with such a dowry could rely on making a very advantageous match.

There does not seem to have been any doubt in the mind of Dutch tulip traders that the auction at Alkmaar was an extraordinary event that deserved to be commemorated. Within a few days of the sale, a one-page pamphlet with the modest title
List of Some Tulips Sold to the Highest Bidder on February 5th 1637
had gone on sale. It gave a few brief details of the circumstances of the auction and listed the prices paid for each of the ninety-nine lots. Some writers have suggested that this pamphlet was meant as a warning against extravagance, but its principal purpose would appear to have been to boost confidence in the tulip trade by making as many people as possible aware of the phenomenal prices that bulbs were now commanding.

In this it was at least partially successful. The pamphlet attained a sufficiently wide circulation for the prices it listed to be regarded as in some way official, even typical. A number of contemporary tulip books that actually indicate the cost of various varieties give the prices attained at Alkmaar, even though they were far in excess of anything that had been realized earlier in the mania. (The idea, presumably,
was to persuade potential purchasers that they should pay high prices.) Thus Admirael Liefkens, the most expensive tulip purchased at the auction in terms of guilders paid per ace, had been worth only six guilders twelve stuivers per ace in June 1636, and Winkel’s three Admirael van der Eijcks—bulbs of a variety that had sold at two guilders ten stuivers per ace the previous July—went for as much as seven guilders fourteen stuivers per ace at Alkmaar.

Tulip mania reached its peak throughout the United Provinces in the last week of January and the first week of February 1637. During this extraordinary fortnight huge amounts of money were pledged in mere moments. Hendrick Pietersz., a baker from Haarlem, paid a hundred guilders for a Gouda weighing just seven aces—a price of more than fourteen guilders per ace, one of the highest ever recorded for a tulip. And extracts from the trading ledger of a Haarlem merchant named Bartholomeus van Gennep, preserved in the legal archives of his city, show that late in January he agreed to pay a single dealer, Abraham Versluys, more than 3,200 guilders for a collection of second-rate bulbs that included none of the highly coveted varieties most commonly associated with the mania:

Moreover, though the passion for bulb dealing was still concentrated in its oldest strongholds, Haarlem and Amsterdam, it had now
reached beyond the borders of Holland and West Friesland, certainly to Utrecht and Groningen and most probably to other provinces as well. Indeed, the horticulturalist Abraham Munting (who was a boy during the mania) noted, without giving details, that speculation in tulips was raging, for a second time, in northern France as well.

The number of people involved in buying and selling tulips across the United Provinces must by now have been fairly considerable. One of the few detailed documents that has survived suggests that in the city of Utrecht, which was far from being one of the largest centers of the bulb trade, there were only about forty serious growers in February 1637. This almost certainly means that a couple of hundred florists and hangers-on also traded in the town. Since bulb growing and flower dealing flourished in at least a dozen cities and districts in Holland alone, from Medemblik in the north to Gouda in the south, it is probably safe to estimate that a minimum of three thousand people found themselves caught up in the tulip mania in this one province. If so, there could scarcely have been fewer than five thousand growers and florists in the Dutch Republic as a whole by the time the mania reached its peak, and this figure could well be a very conservative estimate.

The total value of the flowers bought and sold by such a large number of people must have been staggering. Some authorities suggest that at the height of the mania bulbs were changing hands as often as ten times in a single day—the price rising, presumably, with every deal. The rarest bulbs, on the evidence of the Alkmaar auction, could realize four or five thousand guilders apiece, and even if we accept that the prices realized at the Nieuwe Schutters-Doelen were exceptional, it certainly does not appear to have been unusual for superbly fine tulips to have changed hands for a couple of thousand guilders apiece; lesser varieties for somewhere between the 350 guilders per thousand aces recorded for the red and white Centen and the 750 paid for the popular Bizarden Gheel en Root van Leyde; and
mere pound goods for somewhere between 250 and 1,500 guilders a pound. Thus even if we make the conservative estimate that in one of the largest centers of the tulip trade—a Haarlem or an Amsterdam—a total of, say, four hundred florists met in colleges to deal in bulbs just four times a week, the amount of money that changed hands in that one city during the three or four months that the mania was at its peak could have run well into seven figures. If, for example, the typical florist traded just one pound of tulips a day at an average price of 250 guilders per pound, the volume of trade in a single large town would have approached seven million guilders between the beginning of October 1636 and the end of January 1637 alone.

Some dealers appear to have been at least this active. While the mania was at its peak in December and January, a single tulip trader, Pieter van Rosven of Haarlem, bought bulbs worth 2,913 guilders in the space of only six weeks. He began with the purchase of 306 aces of Petters, a Rosen variety owned by Wouter Tulckens of Alkmaar, and continued with the acquisition of a Violetten Jan Gerritsz. of 288 aces, a Tourlons of 275 aces, and half a pound of Oudenaers from the same dealer. Van Rosven also paid ninety guilders for a Legrant of 122 aces. (Tulckens appears to have acted as a sort of broker for several growers. One of the bulbs he sold to van Rosven was planted in the garden of a Cornelis Verwer, another in a plot kept by the Calvinist minister Henricus Swalmius on the Bollslaen [“Bulb lane”] that lay to the south of Haarlem, and a third in the garden of the painter Frans Grebber.) And these are merely the purchases that found their way into the legal archives of Alkmaar as a result of an action van Rosven brought against Tulckens for the nondelivery of his bulbs; he may well have bought and sold many other tulips in the same brief period.

Van Rosven’s example was certainly not unique. In the
Samenspraecken
, Gaergoedt relates that in the colleges he attended, so many bulbs were bought and sold at high prices that
drietjens
—the maximum
three-guilder sums paid as wine money when a deal exceeded 120 guilders—“fell like drops of water from thatched roofs when it has rained.” “I have often been to inns and eaten baked and fried fish and meat,” the florist adds. “Yes, chickens and rabbits, and even fine pastry, and drunk wine and beer from morning to three or four o’clock at night, and then arrived home with more money than when I left.” When the chronicler Lieuwe van Aitzema guessed that ten million guilders’ worth of tulips changed hands in a single Dutch town in the course of the mania as a whole, then, he may actually have been underestimating the true extent of the trading frenzy.

What, then, did the mania amount to? It is hard to resist the conclusion that in crude financial terms it really was an event of unparalleled magnitude, at least by the standards of the United Provinces. If we accept that van Aitzema was right and that perhaps twenty million guilders’ worth of bulbs were bought and sold in Haarlem and Amsterdam together between 1633 and 1637, then even supposing that the trade in each of the other ten known centers of the mania amounted to no more than a tenth of that in those two great centers, the nominal turnover of the Dutch bulb trade as a whole in those four years can hardly have been less than forty million guilders. And if the florists of Holland really did trade as compulsively and as irresponsibly as the critics of the bulb trade maintained, and if the number of people involved was not thousands but tens of thousands, then the total could conceivably have been twice that figure or even more. By way of comparison, the total sum deposited by rich merchants with accounts at the Bank of Amsterdam in the years 1636–37 was probably only about 3.5 million guilders, and the all-powerful Dutch East India Company—which was the greatest trading organization in the whole of Europe at the time—was capitalized at 6.5 million guilders.

It was left to a contemporary pamphleteer, writing around December 1636, to give perhaps the most vivid impression of what the prices
paid for tulip bulbs actually meant to the Dutchmen of the time. A flower worth three thousand guilders, the writer pointed out, could have been exchanged for a gigantic quantity of goods: