Tulipomania (17 page)

Other variations were also possible. A few poorer florists bought shares in expensive bulbs. On one occasion, an Amsterdam grower, Jan Admirael, sold a half share in three bulbs to a customer named Simon van Poelenburch. On another, Admirael entered into a complicated deal with a dealer named Marten Creitser, agreeing to swap several tulips and 180 guilders in cash for eleven paintings and an engraving owned by Creitser.

Nevertheless, the introduction of pricing by the ace did not mean that tulips of a given variety now cost the same everywhere within the Dutch Republic. Since even the most important messages could travel no faster than a man on horseback, there was no way to communicate changes in price quickly and accurately from place to place and thus no single market for tulips. Instead, each town involved in the bulb trade valued flowers slightly differently; some places were generally expensive, others cheap.

Other factors added to the general chaos in pricing. Not only did individual florists have preferences of their own, they were also influenced by which tulips had just been bought and which sold, by which were in fashion and which were becoming more easily available. Large bulbs were generally cheaper per ace than small ones—and when all of these factors were taken into account, even tulips bought in a single place on a single day could vary significantly in price. Seven Goudas, sold in Alkmaar within the space of an hour or two, fetched prices varying from six guilders three stuivers per ace to ten guilders two stuivers, which meant the buyers paid from 765 guilders
to 1,500 guilders a bulb. Three tulips of a variety called Paragon van Delft were purchased within minutes for one guilder fourteen stuivers an ace, two guilders four stuivers, and four guilders two stuivers respectively, and bulbs of Admirael van der Eijck weighing 92, 214, and 446 aces sold for 710, 1,045, and 1,620 guilders apiece.

The rapid increase in bulb prices in 1635 and the first half of 1636 had important consequences. Wealthy growers and dealers who had hitherto traded bulbs only to connoisseurs or among themselves recognized that there were new opportunities to make money. They began to offer their flowers to the florists who were streaming into the market. Then as a next step, some banded together so as to maximize their capital or improve the variety of stock they had to offer. A number of companies were formed to trade in bulbs. In September 1635, for example, the Haarlem merchant Cornelius Bol the Younger went into partnership with a grower named Jan Coopall; Bol contributed no less than 8,746 guilders 2 stuivers to the capital of the company. And in December 1636 the Haarlemmers Henrick Jacobsz. and Roeland Verroustraeten went into business with Philips Jansz. and Matthijs Bloem of Amsterdam. The articles of their company explained in some detail how the business would operate. The thirty-five-year-old Verroustraeten, who was probably already an experienced trader, was the only one authorized to deal in bulbs, and he would buy and sell tulips with money put up by the other three directors. All four directors agreed to trade only on behalf of the company and never on their own account.

By the autumn of 1636 both the tulip companies and the professional growers must have been thinking carefully about what stock to plant for the next season. The most valuable flowers—the Admiraels, Generaels, Generalissimos, and their kin—were already too expensive for many florists to afford, and the poorer traders at the bottom
of the market had begun to ask for less favored tulips that were available in greater quantity and were significantly cheaper. Like the superbly fine varieties that had been the basis of the bulb trade in the early 1630s, these flowers were termed “piece goods”—that is, tulips that were bought and sold as single bulbs—but because their prices were low, they were quoted not by the ace but in multiples of a thousand aces. Varieties sold in this way included several that became famous in their own right later on, such as the vermilion-streaked Rotgans and Oudenaers and the unusual white-on-purple Lack van Rhijn.

The number of people involved in dealing bulbs was also swiftly increasing, as florists from the artisan class flocked to join the connoisseurs and merchants who had long been involved in the tulip trade. Some ambitious artisans began to buy and sell the flowers in 1634 or 1635, but it was not until the autumn of the following year that the poorer florists entered the market in large numbers, with the greatest influx of newcomers coming in December 1636 and January 1637.

They came from all walks of life. According to one contemporary pamphleteer, their numbers included bricklayers and carpenters, woodcutters and plumbers, glass blowers, farmers, and tradesmen, peddlers and charcuterers, confectioners, smiths, cobblers, coffee grinders, guards, and vintners—not to mention dry shavers, furriers and tanners, coppersmiths and clergymen, printers and lawyers, schoolmasters, millers, and even demolition men. Thus while the legal records of the tulip trade suggest that as late as the summer of 1636 the majority of tulips were still being sold by their growers direct to customers who planned to plant them in their gardens, by the autumn the market had been all but taken over by florists who bought and sold simply to make a profit.

Few details of the frenzied trading that took place as the tulip boom peaked in the last two or three months of 1636 have survived,
but a short series of pamphlets containing a fictionalized account of the tavern trade—published in Haarlem at the beginning of 1637—are agreed to be both reliable and representative of what actually occurred. These are the three
Samenspraeck tusschen Waermondt ende Gaergoedt
(“Conversations between Truemouth and Greedygoods”), written by an unknown author and published by Adriaen Roman, the principal printer then living in Haarlem.

The Gaergoedt of the pamphlets is a weaver who has abandoned his craft to become a florist. He has mortgaged all the tools of his trade to provide himself with working capital, and he now travels from town to town dealing in bulbs. On a rare visit home he meets his old colleague Waermondt, who has yet to become involved in the burgeoning craze, and offers him wine and beer. Then Gaergoedt attempts to persuade his friend to enrich himself by buying and selling tulips. At present, he points out, Waermondt struggles to make a profit of 10 percent on his business. With tulips he will make 100 percent or more: “Yes, ten for one, a hundred for one, and sometimes a thousand.”

The
Samenspraecken
take a predictably moralistic view of the tulip trade. Gaergoedt is hubristic and sublimely, stupidly confident that the price of bulbs will go on rising forever. He boasts that he has already earned a fortune from his flowers and that he pays his way through life with bulbs. His friends—gardeners and other weavers—are also rich and drive from town to town and from college to college in richly decorated coaches.

Waermondt, whom the anonymous pamphleteer casts in the role of bemused but honest beginner, finds it hard to believe that a mere weaver can make such sums, and under his questioning Gaergoedt is forced to admit that he has yet to receive most of the money due to him as a result of his successful trading—his profits cannot be realized until the tulips are lifted again the next summer. Still, he says, “this trade goes steady,” and another two or three years in the bulb
market will more than set him up for the rest of his life. Then, he says, he will use his profits to buy a brewery, a bailiwick, even a lordship.

Waermondt is incredulous; the whole thing, he thinks, is just too good to be true. He wonders how the common people caught up in the tulip craze dare risk all the money they are borrowing against the profits of the trade. And though he is certainly tempted by the talk of money, he tells his friend he prefers not to take the risk of plunging into the flower business.

In the autumn of 1636 many Dutchmen must have thought, like Waermondt, that the profits being made on tulips were simply too good to be true. But thousands did not, and they took their savings and mortgaged their goods in order to take part in the hurly-burly of the bulb trade.

Most had little access to ready money, but the traders and florists who were already in the market saw an opportunity to sell their flowers to novices who had little understanding of which tulips were valuable and which were not, and it quickly became customary to accept deposits not in cash but in kind. For florists whose wealth—what there was of it—was tied up in their possessions, this meant paying for bulbs with whatever came to hand. The fictional Gaergoedt offered deposits ranging from cloth enough to make a coat and suit to a quarter of prunes. Real florists paid in tools, clothes, and household goods if they were artisans, farm animals or crops if they were farmers, paintings and other luxuries if they were rich. The balance of the purchase price was payable only on delivery, which took place at lifting time. On occasion payment terms could be even more flexible; one agreement, in which the Haarlem shopkeeper Aert Ducens sold his entire garden to a local gentleman named Severijn van de Heuvel for sixteen thousand guilders, specifies that payment would fall due only on New Year’s Day 1638, a full year after the contract was agreed.

The
Samenspraecken
give further examples of the sort of agreements struck by these inexperienced tulip traders once the idea of
paying deposits in kind became generally accepted. As Gaergoedt talks his friend Waermondt through the deals he has made and noted in his ledger, he points out one in which he sold a packet of a variety called Witte Croon—“White Crown”—for 525 guilders in cash, with a deposit of four cows to be paid immediately, and another in which he purchased a quantity of Genten by handing over a deposit of “my best shot coat, one old rose-noble, and one coin with a silver chain to hang around a child’s neck” and agreeing to pay eighteen thousand guilders cash when the bulbs were ready for delivery. Some agreements appear to have been even more complicated than that. For example, the
Samenspraecken
suggest that florists sometimes offered bulbs of one variety in part exchange for tulips of another. One of Gaergoedt’s most extravagant arrangements called for him to receive a large quantity of Witte Croonen, together with a coach and horses, two silver bowls, and 150 guilders cash. On his part, the weaver agreed to hand over a silver dish worth sixty guilders, an equal amount of Gheele Croonen (“Yellow Crowns”), and two hundred guilders in cash.

As the autumn of 1636 shaded into winter, all seemed well in the flower business. The number of florists and the number of bulbs in circulation both continued to increase. Prices rose steadily. Profits were enormous. Yet in reality the tulip trade that the florists had built rested on the shakiest of foundations.

It was not simply a matter of whether the market could possibly sustain the rapid rise in bulb prices. All sorts of problems occurred when a florist was unable to inspect the flowers he was purchasing. To begin with there was no guarantee that the tulips were being handled with proper care. The Haarlem archives contain the details of a case concerning a local baker named Jeuriaen Jansz., who in the spring of 1636 found a beautiful specimen of Admirael Liefkens flowering in the Amsterdam garden of Marten Creitser. Jansz. struck a deal to buy the offsets. A few months later the baker was sitting in a
tavern college when another florist told him the bulb had been lifted prematurely and thus might have been damaged. Jansz. had to threaten legal action to force Creitser to release him from his obligation to purchase the offsets. Even rich connoisseurs ran the risk of buying damaged goods. Cornelis Guldewagen, who had been one of the aldermen of Haarlem, acquired no fewer than thirteen hundred tulips from Anthony van Flory of The Hague and retained Barent Cardoes to plant them in his garden outside the Cruyspoort by the city moat. When the bulbs were unpacked, Cardoes and his assistant found they had been lifted very clumsily and about half had been badly damaged.

The poorly understood mysteries of breaking also caused considerable problems. Anyone who purchased an offset risked buying a breeder bulb rather than the broken tulip he desired. In May 1633 Abraham de Goyer, one of the most prominent tulip dealers of Amsterdam, bought two Paragon Schilders at an auction organized by the man who had created the variety, Abraham de Schilder himself. Paragon Schilder was a new variety and highly coveted; judging by the date that de Schilder chose to hold his auction, de Goyer had probably seen the tulip in flower a few days earlier and been entranced by it. At any rate he paid what was by the standards of the time a substantial price for his two bulbs—fifty guilders for one and forty-one guilders for the other—planted them in his garden just outside the city walls, and settled back to wait nine long months for them to bloom again. Finally, in the spring of 1634, the longed-for tulips flowered—but when they did, the two Paragons proved to be nothing like the glorious Rosens that de Goyer had anticipated. The pure whites and vivid scarlets that the grower had fallen in love with in de Schilder’s garden were nowhere to be seen. De Goyer’s ninety guilders had bought nothing but the muddy colors of inferior breeders. The unfortunate grower was still demanding his money back eighteen months later, even though it was generally accepted that
reputable bulb dealers would consider a purchase null and void when an offset failed to match the quality of the mother bulb.