Buyers came from all over the Netherlands to bid on the bulbs. Tulip connoisseurs and wealthy growers crowded the inns of Alkmaar. Bidders were given a chance to inspect a tulip book commissioned by the court: 124 watercolors of Winkel’s tulips. Before the auction even began, one wealthy and determined buyer arranged a private purchase of the most valuable bulb in the collection for an astonishing 3,200 guilders. The price seemed to set the tone for the auction itself. Buyers bid fiercely, raising the price of every bulb to the highest ever recorded. By the end of the day, the auctioneers had raised 90,000 guilders for the Winkel orphans, more than one million dollars in today’s money. Winkel’s children were set for life; if the orphanage trustees had delayed for a week, the children would have had nothing.
THE TULIP CRAZE OF 1636–37 created the world’s first economic bubble—and its first crash.
Depiction of tulips on Syrian tile from the 17th century
The Netherlands was the heart of the tulip craze: a tiny country that had become a major economic power thanks to American silver and the Asian luxury trade. By 1633, five hundred different varieties of tulips were being grown in the Dutch Republic alone.
Tulip bulbs were so valuable that their weight was measured in azen, a unit of measurement borrowed from goldsmiths. One ace was 1/2000 of an ounce. Fashionable varieties, prized by connoisseurs for their brilliant color and unpredictable flamed, feathered, and striped patterns, were sold by the bulb—the price based on rarity value and the weight of the bulb. More common, single-colored varieties were sold by the basket. If a particular tulip became widely available, it fell out of fashion and dropped in value, so the owners of highly prized varieties guarded the bulbs carefully. The most famous and coveted tulip of the period, the red-and-white-flamed Semper Augustus, was so rare that one man owned the only twelve bulbs in existence. He refused to share them at any price.
At first the sale of bulbs was tied to the growing season. Bulbs were bought between the time when they were “lifted” from the ground in June until they were planted again in October. Around 1634, growers began to sell tulips in the winter for future delivery, adding new instability to the unregulated tulip market. Sales contracts were written for a particular bulb from a particular location, to be delivered and paid for when the bulbs were lifted the following June. Some contracts included conditions that the bulb be a certain weight or contain a specific number of new buds. Some particularly desirable tulips changed hands several times before they bloomed.
The demand for tulips exploded in 1634 and 1635.
FUTURES TRADING
Futures trading, sometimes described by the derogatory term “wind trade,” was already a familiar practice in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. High-ranking merchants and stock exchange specialists bought and sold futures contracts on 360 commodities traded at the Amsterdam stock exchange, including Baltic grain, herring, and East Indian spices.
Futures trading in tulips was less formal, without the regulations and safeguards of the stock exchange. Although a few companies were formed to trade in tulips, most people bought or sold bulbs as a hobby or a sideline to another business. Trades often took place in the back rooms of taverns, regulated only by local practice and the community of buyers and sellers—for this reason it can be said the tulip craze created the first “rogue traders.”
The plague had struck the Netherlands between 1633 and 1635, causing a serious labor shortage. Wages were high, and people could afford small luxuries. A skilled tradesman might not be able to afford a fashionable bulb, like a Gouda or a Viceroy, but he could easily afford a basket of common bulbs or even a single-color breeder bulb. At the same time, tulips came into vogue among the upper classes in France. Women wore clusters of tulips in their bosoms, and wealthy men competed to buy the most dramatic blooms.
The supply of bulbs could not keep up with increased demand from both the top and the bottom of the market. Prices began to rise and rise and rise. By December 1636, prices were going up so quickly that the value of some bulbs doubled in a little more than a week. An Admiral van der Eyck bulb was offered for 1,000 guilders—the price of a modest house in Haarlem or 5,714 pounds of meat. The price for common bulbs rose even more quickly than the price for rare varieties, increasing twenty times over the course of a few weeks.
The Alkmaar auction marked the height of the tulip market. A week later, the market crashed: the end of the world’s first known economic bubble. Bulb prices dropped by the hour. Sellers worried they would not be paid for bulbs they had sold for delivery in June. Buyers feared they would be forced to pay inflated prices for now-worthless bulbs. Conflicts over the sale of bulbs were so common that the High Court of Holland refused to allow tulip-related claims in the courts.
Within a year or two, the tulip market recovered its equilibrium. Connoisseurs continued to buy rare bulbs at high prices. As first the tulip and then the hyacinth became fashionable in other European countries, Dutch growers developed a thriving export trade in flower bulbs. Ironically, Dutch tulip growers shipped tens of thousands of tulip bulbs to the Ottoman court in the 1690s when Istanbul was convulsed by its own version of tulipomania. Today, the Netherlands produces 70 percent of the commercially grown flowers in the world, and tulips are still the most important flower they sell.
WHAT WOULD 3,000 GUILDERS BUY?
A Dutchman writing at the height of tulipmania claimed that the same 3,000 guilders that bought a single rare tulip bulb could have bought:
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 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
TOTAL 3,000 guilders
1621. LUANDA, ANGOLA. A HUNDRED year long guerrilla war began between an African queen determined to defend her people’s independence and a European power hungry for slaves.
Nzinga a Mbande, the eldest sister of King Ngola Mbande, orchestrated her arrival at the audience chamber of the new Portuguese governor at Luanda with care. She was there to negotiate a treaty on behalf of a country that her brother had already abandoned to the Portuguese. It would be fatal if she appeared as the humble messenger of a defeated king. Musicians heralded her approach when she entered the chamber, a royal princess accompanied by her serving women.
The new Portuguese governor, João Correia de Sousa, was just as aware of the power of symbols as Nzinga. He greeted her from the ornate governor’s throne and gestured for her to sit on the floor, where a cushion waited for her, as if an African ruler would be unaccustomed to sitting on a chair. Nzinga would have none of it. She was here to negotiate not to grovel at the governor’s feet. She looked around the room for a chair of equal magnificence. Finding no chair at all, she summoned one of her waiting woman who came forward and assumed a position on her hands and knees. Nzinga sat on her back as if she were a human chair, one worth more than any piece of carved wood, no matter how ornate. It was time to negotiate.
The first contacts between the Portuguese and Ndongo, the kingdom of the Mbundu tribes, in the early sixteenth century were friendly. The ruler at the time, Ngola Kiluanji, welcomed trade with Europeans, as long as he was able to dispose of criminals and prisoners of war without enslaving his own people. In fact, his kingdom flourished in the early days of the Portuguese slave trade. Over time, Ndongo’s growing prosperity led the kingdom into direct conflict with the Portuguese slave trade on which it was based. By 1581, when the princess Nzinga was born, Ndongo was at war with Portugal, a condition that would last for nearly one hundred years.
In 1618, Nzinga’s oldest brother, Mbande, overthrew their father and made himself ngola. Because he was illegitimate and his right to the throne was questioned, he killed all potential rivals for the throne, including his younger brother, Nzinga’s only son, and all the chiefs who had supported his succession. Nzinga fled the Ndongo capital and settled in the neighboring territory of Matamba with her husband and two sisters.
Mbande was less successful at fighting the Portuguese than he was at fighting his own family. When the Portuguese advanced into Mbundu territory in search of silver, the ngola took refuge on the islands of Kindonga in the Cuanza River.
In 1621, João Correia de Sousa relieved Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos as governor of Luanda. Hoping a change of governor offered a chance for peace, Mbande sent word to his sister, asking her to negotiate a treaty with the Portuguese.
At first Nzinga’s mission appeared successful. Correia de Sousa agreed to recognize Ngola Mbande as the independent ruler of the kingdom of Ndongo, to withdraw Portuguese forces from the fortress of Ambaca, and to cooperate with the Mbundu in expelling the Imbangala, an ad hoc tribe of escaped slaves and criminals that both sides had used in recent wars and that now posed a threat to both the Portuguese and Ndongo. In return, Nzinga agreed that Ndongo would return Portuguese prisoners of war and resume trade; that Mbande and his court would return to the mainland; and that Mbande would become a Christian. Nzinga herself was baptized immediately, taking the name Ana de Sousa. The Portuguese governor served as her godfather.
The crucial terms of the treaty were never carried out. Portuguese forces and settlers remained at Ambaca. Correia de Sousa raised troops to attack the Imbangala, but never sent them. Ngola Mbande remained in self-imposed exile in the Kindonga Islands. Nzinga returned to Luanda to convince Correia de Sousa to fulfill the terms of their agreement, without success. Soon after Nzinga returned, Ngola Mbande died. (The Portuguese claimed Nzinga murdered him; Angolan oral history claims he took poison in a moment of desperation.)
In 1624, shortly after Mbande’s death, the Portuguese Crown replaced Correia de Sousa with a new governor, Fernão de Sousa. De Sousa arrived in Africa with clear instructions to concentrate on trade, not war. His first steps were to establish government markets for the cloth and slave trade at strategic locations in Portuguese-controlled Kongo and to improve relationships with African rulers who were willing to trade with the Portuguese.
Nzinga, serving as the regent of Ndongo, was eager to open negotiations with the new governor. She wrote to de Sousa regarding the treaty she had twice negotiated with the Portuguese on behalf of her dead brother. If the Portuguese withdrew from Ambaca, she would return to the mainland from the Kindonga Islands and reopen the slave market at Kisala, ordering her subjects to take slaves there.
At first Sousa seemed willing to honor the previously negotiated treaty. He soon changed his position as settlers at Ambaca complained that Nzinga encouraged their slaves to run away and enjoy freedom at home rather than remaining as Portuguese captives. De Sousa not only refused to return the free people who had been illegally seized by the settlers at Ambaca, but he demanded that Nzinga return the illegally captured slaves who had fled the Ambaca settlers.
While negotiating with de Sousa, Nzinga seized the throne of Ndongo. Ngola Mbande had left a minor son as his heir. He had carefully divided responsibility for the boy between an Imbangala ally, Kaza, who was given the boy to raise, and Nzinga, who was appointed regent. Sometime between March and September 1625, Nzinga convinced Kaza to turn the boy over to her, using a combination of lavish presents and an offer of marriage. Blinded by her beauty, the Imbangala leader gave her the boy, whom she immediately poisoned.
De Sousa used the boy’s death as an excuse to declare war and set up a rival claimant to the throne, Hari a Kiluanji, as a puppet ruler of Ndongo. Factions of the Mbundu who did not accept Nzinga as a legitimate ruler joined forces with the Portuguese to remove her from the throne.
Nzinga and the Portuguese were almost constantly at war for thirty years. Between 1626 and 1655, the queen commanded her own forces against the Portuguese army, using guerrilla warfare tactics for the most part. In 1630, she moved her people to the east and conquered a new kingdom, Matamba, which she used as a base for attacking settlements under the rule of Ngola Hari and the Portuguese. In 1641, she formed an alliance with the Dutch that almost brought Portuguese rule in Angola to an end.
After the Dutch were defeated in 1648, Nzinga retreated to the highlands of Matamba and continued her guerrilla campaign against the Portuguese. She never recovered Ndongo, but Matamba slowly developed into a kingdom in its own right, welcoming runaway slaves and renegades from the Portuguese army.
In 1654, at age seventy-two, Nzinga gave up the battlefield in favor of diplomacy, using the Capuchin missionaries in her court as intermediaries in her peace negotiations with the Portuguese. When she died in 1663, the nation she had created still survived, ruled by her sister, Dona Barbara, and her descendants.
The modern state of Angola got its name as a result of cultural miscommunication. The Portuguese mistook the title of the ruler (ngola) of Ndongo for the name of his country. As a result, they called the kingdom Angola.
The Portuguese retained Angola as a colony until 1975.
WHILE THE SPANISH DUG FOR precious metals in Latin America, other European powers were beginning to find their own territories in the New World—and other kinds of treasure.
The first Europeans to cultivate the resources of North America were the Basque, English, French, and Portuguese fishing fleets that competed for control of the fishing grounds off the shores of Newfoundland, which were filled with schools of North Atlantic cod.
English settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607 looking for gold. They settled for tobacco. The Jamestown settlers were followed by radical Protestants looking for religious freedom for themselves, if not for anyone else, in Massachusetts.
Other early American settlers included refugees from British debtors’ prisons who made their way to Georgia and freethinking Quakers who took up residence in Pennsylvania. The English were not the only ones to found colonies. In 1608, the French founded Quebec, the capital of a colony of fur trappers and missionaries. The Dutch, rulers of the sea in the first half of the seventeenth century, founded New Amsterdam, now New York, in 1624 and spread along the Hudson River Valley. Swedish, Dutch, and German stockholders founded New Sweden at the site of what is now Wilmington, Delaware, fourteen years later.
The riches of the New World had already begun to change Europe; now European settlers were on the verge of transforming the New World. Some fled oppression. Some were sponsored by joint stock companies or venture capitalists who wanted a return on their investment. Some were groups of single men looking to wrest wealth from the wilderness. Others were families looking to build homes. They all found hard work, abundant resources, and what they incorrectly perceived as an almost empty wilderness.
The early settlers still thought of themselves as Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Dutch, but the seeds of the idea of America as a “land of the free” were already in place. It would be more than 150 years before they transformed themselves into Americans, boldly seeking independence from colonial powers. They created a new nation founded on principles forged in ancient Greece and nurtured in the Roman Republic.
New World settlements 1600 to 1630s
AN ALLIANCE FOR SURVIVAL
The settlers of Plymouth Colony were unprepared for the realities of life in their new home. More than half of them died during the first harsh winter.
When the spring came, they needed help learning to farm the unfamiliar soil of the New World. The Wampanoag showed them how to use freshwater herring as fertilizer to farm a crop they had never seen before. The Wampanoag called it weachimineash. Maize became the staple diet for the generations that followed these pioneering American settlers; it remains so in America and around the world today.
After the colonists’
first harvest, the survivors organized a celebratory feast. They invited the Native Americans who had helped them to join them. About ninety Wampanoag arrived to share in the celebration; when they saw the inadequacy of the settlers’ supplies, they went hunting and returned with three deer they presented as gifts.
In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving as a national holiday, to be held in November each year in memory of what became known as “the first Thanksgiving.”
The Plymouth colonists gave the modern United States more than a national holiday. In their Mayflower Compact, composed on ship during their journey across the Atlantic, the citizens of Plymouth Colony put on paper the principle of voluntary self-government that would form the core of the American republic. Today 10 percent of all Americans can trace their ancestry back to the survivors who arrived on the Mayflower.
9
WILDERNESS
FROM THE MOMENT THE FIRST HOMINIDS MIGRATED OUT OF THE RIFT VALLEY, IN SEARCH OF NEW TERRITORY, TO THE MOST RECENT SPACE FLIGHT, HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS EXPLORED NEW FRONTIERS.
We push our boundaries in the hunt for new resources and new knowledge with which to exploit them.
Now it is the seventeenth century, and Europe has entered a period of expansion, exploration, and experimentation that will lay the foundation for the world to come. New frontiers lure mankind to the far reaches of continents and the precipice of modern science. It is a period of stark contrasts: witch burning and the rise of empiricism. The creation both of European states ruled by absolute monarchs and of the political philosophies that will lead to revolution. It is a time of extreme luxury for a few extreme poverty for most. In many places, there is a new sense of possibility in the air.
Mankind Page 25
