Tulipomania

by Mike Dash

  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:

  Two pounds of Yellow and Red Crowns 385 guilders

  A pound of Switsers 280 guilders

  3,000 aces of Centen 380 guilders

  Half a pound of Oudenaers 1,430 guilders

  1,000 aces of Le Grands 480 guilders

  1,000 aces of Gevleugelde Coornharts 220 guilders

  70 aces of Kistemaecker 12 guilders

  410 aces of Gevlamde Nieulant 54 guilders

  3,241 guilders

  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:

  Eight fat pigs 240 guilders

  Four fat oxen 480 guilders

  Twelve fat sheep 120 guilders

  Twenty-four tons of wheat 448 guilders

  Forty-eight tons of rye 558 guilders

  Two hogsheads of wine 70 guilders

  Four barrels of eight-guilder beer 32 guilders

  Two tons of butter 192 guilders

  A thousand pounds of cheese 120 guilders

  A silver drinking cup 60 guilders

  A pack of clothes 80 guilders

  A bed with mattress and bedding 100 guilders

  A ship 500 guilders

  3,000 guilders

  From this perspective, it is evident that the tulip trade really was not merely healthy but positively booming in Holland in the autumn and winter of 1636–37. Yet even as the mania reached its peak, there were disturbing indications that all was not well in the tavern colleges.

  One warning sign was the florists’ restless search for novelty. Although most seem to have agreed that one or two varieties, such as Viceroy, stood apart from their many rivals, there was very little consensus as to which tulips deserved to stand in the second rank—a problem that was exacerbated by the considerable similarities that existed between many of the more popular flowers. One college or town favored one variety, others another; furthermore, fashions and opinions changed, and new tulips continued to come onto the market to challenge the established favorites. Because of this the trade in bulbs was not just unstable but inherently illogical. No market can flourish for long if it does not possess elements of stability and predictability. The Dutch tulip trade had neither.

  A notorious example of the florists’ restless desire to find something new and different was the quest for the black tulip, a flower of such fabled rarity that it would certainly have been worth considerably more than even Semper Augustus if only an exemplar could have been found. The French novelist Alexander Dumas even wrote a novel titled The Black Tulip, in which a young physician named Cornelius van Baerle seeks to win the huge prize offered to the first man to grow such a flower. Dumas was most likely inspired by an old Dutch account of an incident that allegedly took place at the height of the mania. According to one version of this story, a syndicate of Haarlem florists heard that a cobbler living at The Hague had succeeded in breeding a black tulip and determined to purchase the solitary flower that he possessed. They visited him in his shop, and after a certain amount of bargaining, the cobbler agreed to accept fifteen hundred guilders for his tulip and handed over the bulb. To his complete astonishment the Haarlem florists immediately hurled the black tulip to the ground and trampled on it, exclaiming: “Idiot! We have a black tulip too, and chance will never favor you again. We would have given you 10,000 guilders if you had asked it.” Assured that their own bulb was once again unique and therefore priceless, the Haarlemmers returned to their city, leaving the unfortunate cobbler so distraught at the thought of the wealth that might have been his that he hanged himself the same night.

  The story of the black tulip is, of course, a myth. Indeed the botany of the genus is such that it is actually impossible to breed a flower with pure black petals; even today the handful of “black” tulips that exist are merely an exceptionally dark shade of purple. Nevertheless, the fact that the black tulip legend achieved a certain currency during the years of the tulip mania might perhaps have alerted the more astute florists to the fact that a dangerous gap was beginning to develop between ever-increasing demand in the bulb market and what growers could actually supply, given the time it took to introduce a new variety and the limited stock of botanical tulips available.

  Still more worrisome was the boom in the market for pound goods that occurred in the autumn of 1636. The astonishing prices being asked for these previously worthless bulbs by the beginning of 1637 should have given any florist pause. However high the prices of superbly fine tulips rose, there was always some justification for them. Throughout the mania years there remained a small but genuine demand for such bulbs from the old tulip connoisseurs—the only people who actually wanted to plant and grow the bulbs rather than simply trade them. No such demand existed in the case of pound goods. Connoisseurs would not touch them, and most college florists were not remotely interested in actually cultivating them. They were traded solely because they were available, and by early February even devoted tulip maniacs began to be uneasily aware that their market was running out of control.

  The success of the auction at Alkmaar did provide some reassurance that high prices were still being paid for bulbs, but even so, a few of the more cautious dealers must have begun to wonder just how much longer tulip prices could continue to rise. Here and there an isolated florist sold his holdings and declined to reinvest his profits in yet more bulbs. In the tavern colleges dotted across Holland, rival traders looked on and wondered if the seller knew something they did not. Perhaps, they thought, they might dispose of a bulb or two themselves.

  It was the first week of February, 1637. The boom time was over.

  CHAPTER 13

  Bust

  The great crash in tulip prices began in Haarlem on the first Tuesday of that February, when a group of florists gathered to buy and sell as usual in one of the city’s tavern colleges.

  As was customary, an established member of the college began the day’s trading by testing the state of the market; he offered a pound of Witte Croonen or Switsers for sale. The florist asked a fair price—1,250 guilders—for the bulbs, and in the normal course of events he would have found several eager buyers. Slates and chalk would have been distributed, the tulips would have been knocked down to the highest bidder, and the rest of the day’s trading would have continued in its usual frenzied way. On this day, however, there were no bidders for the bulbs at 1,250 guilders. The auctioneer offered them again, this time cutting the price to 1,100 guilders. Still there was no interest. Desperately now, he offered his bulbs for a third time, dropping his price to a risible thousand guilders the pound. Once again there were no bids.

  It is easy to imagine the awkward silence that must have descended upon the group of florists hunched around their table in the tavern as this awful, farcical auction ran its course: the half-drunk tankards of beer hanging in midair, partway to the lips of drinkers who suddenly understood the importance of what was happening in front of them; the nervous glances exchanged by traders who had not the slightest idea what to do next or how they were supposed to react. The silence must have lingered for a second or two and then been broken by a swelling hubbub of anxious conversation as bedlam enveloped the college and every florist present started talking at once.
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  In all likelihood every one of the traders present had paid similar prices for similar bulbs within the past few days in anticipation of selling again for another handsome profit. Now, in a matter of no more than a minute or so, their assumptions had been shattered. The ugly question of what would become of the bulb trade had been raised. Plainly it would have been impossible to continue with the normal business of the day. Perhaps some brief attempt was made to sell other bulbs, without success, but the college must have suspended trading almost immediately, and in the general confusion one or two of the assembled company no doubt ran to inform their friends and family of what had occurred. In no time all the colleges in Haarlem would have heard the news, and every florist in the town and beyond the walls would have been gripped by a simple impulse: Sell.

  It took only a few days for the panic to spread through the rest of the United Provinces. In college after college and in town after town, desperate florists discovered that flowers that had been worth thousands of guilders only a day or two before now could not be sold for any price. A few dealers kept their heads and tried to stimulate renewed interest by organizing mock auctions or offering bulbs at huge discounts, but they were ignored. In most places the tavern trade crashed so completely that it was not even a question of prices falling to a quarter or a tenth of what they had been when the mania was at its peak. The market for tulips simply ceased to exist.

  Many florists must have found themselves in the same plight as Gaergoedt, the weaver described by the author of the Samenspraecken. Caught out by the unexpected fall in prices, Gaergoedt’s first reaction is to go out to buy and sell again. He retains some of his old confidence, telling his friend Waermondt: “Flora may be ill, but she will not die.” While his wife, Christijntje, bewails her husband’s decision to sell off his loom and all his weaving tools, Gaergoedt returns to the colleges, only to find that the market really has collapsed and all trading has come to a halt. Unable to find a single buyer for his bulbs, and conscious of the many debts he has incurred in buying tulips and laying out a garden, the hapless weaver asks his friend what he should do. Waermondt’s advice is brutally straightforward: The tulip trade is dead, he says, there is no chance of reviving it, and the florists have no option but to return to their old jobs and their proper stations. The best they can hope for is to be given the opportunity to discharge their debts honorably.