Tulipomania (18 page)

Most serious of all were a handful of cases of outright fraud, which were perhaps inevitable in a market as rich and as poorly regulated as the bulb trade. When tulips of the same variety could often differ quite substantially in appearance, and a poor Viceroy could look much the same as a less valuable Violetten—say, an Admirael van Engeland—it was often difficult to distinguish between real deceit and genuine mistakes, and certainly the legal archives of the Dutch Republic appear to contain few cases that were proven. But Waermondt, in the
Samenspraecken
, said he had spoken to his cousin, who had experience of the tulip trade, and been told of people who paid for Witte Croonen and received instead worthless unicolored tulips. Of course, because all bulbs looked much the same, frauds such as this were discovered only when the tulips flowered in the spring.

But though problems such as these concerned more conservative and cautious Dutchmen, the florists who flocked to trade in tulips in the autumn of 1636 focused almost solely on the money they were making. Because demand for bulbs was growing day by day, prices were rising more and more quickly; by this time, as the contemporary chronicler Lieuwe van Aitzema recorded, everything that could be called a tulip—even bulbs that had been considered so useless that they had been thrown away on dunghills only months before—was now worth money.

In most respects all that was required for the boom in tulip prices to turn into a full-fledged mania was now in place. Many different varieties had been created, some much coveted but scarce, others less desirable but easier to obtain. A small group of professional gardeners existed to breed new flowers and supply at least some of the demand for the existing ones. A larger group of competent and enthusiastic amateurs, certainly several hundred strong, were also
growing tulips in their own gardens, so the flowers could already be found in almost every town. The rules of trading had been established, and there were criteria for measuring a flower’s worth and allotting it a place on a scale that ran from superbly fine to rude. The traders and growers who dominated the trade had been joined by thousands of florists willing to sell everything they owned for bulbs. Finally, prices were higher than they had ever been before. All that was needed now was a way of bringing aspiring tulip dealers together: a place in which to trade.

R
ight in the heart of Amsterdam, almost on top of the dam that actually gave the town its name, was an elegant four-story quadrangle, built in the Flemish style and crowned with a slim and elegant clock tower. This building stood opposite the central bank and close to the town hall in a position that emphasized the central role it played in the life of the city and indeed the United Provinces as a whole. It was Amsterdam’s new
beurs
—the city’s stock exchange.

Not too many years before, the traders who now occupied one or other of the 123 offices in the exchange had been forced to transact their business out in the open on Amsterdam’s New Bridge or—if wet—among the pews of St. Olaf’s Chapel or the town’s Old Church. As the city boomed in the early years of the seventeenth century, however, and foreign trade poured in, it became clear that the stock exchange needed a permanent and weatherproof home.
The
beurs
, which opened for business in 1610, met that need and, by its sheer physical presence, went some way to assuaging the suspicions of Amsterdam’s more conservative burghers, who felt there was something faintly ungodly about dealing in shares.

Trading on the
beurs
was strictly regulated and was permitted only between the hours of noon and two. Each day’s trading had to be packed into those two hours, and the raucous frenzy that erupted within the quadrangle as the big clock in the tower struck midday was such that anyone strolling past the exchange at noon might be forgiven for concluding that the burghers had a point. Business was conducted at such a pace that brokers who years earlier had sealed each deal with an elaborate ritual of handshakes now merely slapped wildly at each other’s hands before rushing on to the next trade.

Hundreds of traders were licensed to deal on the stock exchange—there were perhaps four hundred official
beurs
brokers in the 1630s, and they were joined on the trading floor by up to eight hundred unlicensed freelance dealers who specialized in trading small packages of shares at low prices. In one description of the exchange, the contemporary writer Joseph de la Vega observed one such freelance dealer, who “chews his nails, pulls his fingers, closes his eyes, takes four paces, and four times talks to himself, raises his hand to his cheek as if he has a tooth-ache, and all this accompanied by a mysterious coughing.” Vega does not mention what his small-time broker was hoping to buy or sell for his handful of guilders, but he had a considerable choice: By 1636 at least 360 different commodities were traded on the Amsterdam exchange. Tulips, however, were not among them.

This fact may come as a surprise to those who assume that a financial calamity with the reputation that the tulip mania enjoys must necessarily have been serious and widespread and have had a significant impact on the stock market, on trade, and on the Dutch economy in general. Nothing could be further from the truth. The speculation in tulip bulbs always existed at the margins of Dutch economic life.
It was conducted by amateurs, not professional traders, and was never subject either to the customs (however peculiar) or to the regulation of the stock exchange. The mania took, in fact, the form of a rough but intended parody of the trade in commodities and shares that flourished on the
beurs
. It was the province not of financiers experienced in the ways of business, but of country people and poor city dwellers who had, when they started dealing in bulbs, almost certainly never owned a single share in their whole lives.

The fact that the tulips were not dealt on the stock exchange does not mean the flower business was not regulated. In fact, it soon evolved into a complicated, even ritualized affair in which buyer and seller dealt according to fixed rules and were united by mutual obligations, agreed to in front of witnesses, and noted in writing. Like the brokers who once congregated on the New Bridge, the tulip traders needed somewhere to transact their business. Like the brokers, some of them used the house of God upon occasion; when the mania took place, the local church was a general meeting place pressed into use by everyone from local merchants to courting couples. Most, however, found it far more comfortable to buy and sell their bulbs in a convenient tavern. The tulip trader’s stock exchange was his local pub.

The “colleges” of growers and dealers who met in the back rooms of Dutch inns were such a central feature of the tulip mania that it is important to get an impression of what the taverns of the 1630s were like. Unless the conditions in which the bulbs were actually traded are understood—late at night, in smoke-filled rooms, by drunken men—the mania itself will always remain a mystery.

Inns were, to begin with, so common in the United Provinces as to be commonplace. In 1613, for example, Amsterdam already had five for every hundred inhabitants, which suggests that in 1636 there were probably two hundred packed within the city walls of Haarlem—an area not that much bigger than Hyde Park. These drinking houses ranged from full-fledged taverns to dingy cellars and apothecaries’
shops. Perhaps a fifth were unlicensed and illegal and specialized in evading the high beer tax imposed to help pay for the war with Spain. The authorities had to carry out frequent raids to keep the spread of such establishments in check.

It was only the larger and more reputable inns, however, that would have been able to offer the private rooms required by the tulip traders. They went by names such as the Beelzebub, the Finch, the Lion, and the Devil on a Chain. Establishments of this sort could be found both within and without a city’s walls.

In Haarlem, for example, many taverns clustered to the south of the city, amid the glades and walks of Haarlem’s famous woods. Because they were close to the earliest tulip farms just to the north, it seems reasonable to assume that some of them, at least, must have hosted groups of florists trading bulbs. If so, then the tulip dealers would have shared the premises with unsavory companions. Prostitution having been outlawed—ostensibly at least—within Haarlem’s city walls, the taverns of the Haarlemmerhout frequently doubled as brothels. The most notorious of the local whorehouses cannot have been easy to miss—it appears in the records of the time as “the red house outside the gate of the cross.”

We do not know for certain how many of the dozens of taverns in Haarlem itself played host to the tulip maniacs of 1636, but it seems a fair guess that one that did was a large and well-known inn called De Gulde Druyf, which occupied a prime location on the corner of the market square and the city’s main street, the Koningsstraat. This tavern—the name means “The Golden Grape”—was owned by the brothers Jan and Cornelis Quaeckel, though they did not run it day to day. The Quaeckel brothers were the sons of an innkeeper named Cornelis Gerritsz. Quaeckel, who had been one of the most important pioneer tulip growers in Holland. At least five new varieties of tulip, created by him in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, bore the Quaeckel name in honor of his achievements, including the white and
violet Lack van Quaeckel and a popular Bizarden named Mervelye van Quaeckel—“Quaeckel’s miracle.” Old Quaeckel died, aged almost seventy, in 1632, but his youngest son, Jan, continued to be active in the tulip business up to and beyond the peak of the mania. Nothing could have been more natural than for him to have played host to Haarlem’s traders in a back room of his own tavern, which was not only perfectly situated but also one of the most popular watering holes in Haarlem.

Suppose, then, that we were to travel from Amsterdam to pay a visit to The Golden Grape one day in the late autumn of 1636 and watch tulip traders at work. What would we have seen? Leaving Amsterdam late in the afternoon and traveling, perhaps, along the newly opened passenger canal that linked the two cities—the first of its kind in the United Provinces—visitors would arrive at Haarlem at dusk. The journey from one city to another took only two and a quarter hours. It was so quick and so convenient that fashionable Amsterdammers soon found it easier to send their dirty washing by boat to the superior laundries of Haarlem than to do it themselves. Those on board the canal boats passed the time discussing current affairs and reading specially produced small pamphlets called
schuitepraatjes
, or “towboat talks.” During the autumn and winter of 1636, the new brightly colored barges would certainly have been hotbeds of gossip about the latest developments in the tulip mania.

As the boat approached Haarlem, the travelers’ first glimpse of the city would be of a long line of red-brown roofs, crowned with wisps of smoke from many thousands of chimneys, rising clear of the meadowlands that surrounded the town. Next they would see that a low perimeter wall of brick and a defensive moat spanned by nine bridges protected the city. Far to the west, beyond the roofscape, the ragged outlines of the giant sand dunes that lined the North Sea coast might just be seen rising to meet the characteristic soft gray sky of Holland. And to the south they would glimpse the grim black expanse of the Haarlemmermeer—huge, brackish, and shallow, a windswept
inland sea prone to violent storms, constantly eroding its banks, and eating up more and more of the surrounding farmland so that now it washed up only a mile or so short of the walls of Haarlem itself. The
meer
enjoyed an evil reputation for claiming the lives of those foolish enough to sail on it; Haarlemmers called it “the water wolf.”

Alighting from their barge just outside the city walls, travelers from Amsterdam would find themselves standing at a gate called the Amsterdamsepoort. Here Haarlem’s regents had erected a set of gallows, a triangle of three brick pillars joined by iron beams, and some wooden posts to which were strapped the bodies of recently executed criminals. Because the city was the home of the official executioner for the whole province—a man who bore the title “master of high works of Holland”—and saw to the dispatch of prisoners from Amsterdam as well as its own criminals, these contraptions would probably be full. When Sir William Brereton passed this way in 1634, he encountered not only the fleshless skeletons of two unfortunates swinging from the gallows, but also the mutilated body of a girl who had been broken on the wheel for murdering her own child and the blackened corpse of a beggar who had been burned at the stake for setting a whole village ablaze.

Entering the city through the Amsterdamsepoort, the visitor’s first impression would probably be of Haarlem’s distinctive smell. The city stank of buttermilk and malt, the aromas of its two principal industries: bleaching and beer. Haarlem breweries produced a fifth of all the beer made in Holland, and the town’s celebrated linen bleacheries, just outside the walls, used hundreds of gallons of buttermilk a day to dye cloth shipped to the city from all over Europe a dazzling white. The milk filled a series of huge bleaching pits along the west walls, and each evening it was drained off into Haarlem’s moat and thence into the river Spaarne, dyeing the waters white.

Night draws in quickly in the Dutch Republic by late autumn, and it would have been dark by the time travelers from outside the city
found their way to the market square. In 1636 Haarlem did not yet enjoy more than rudimentary street lighting, and the only light in its maze of cramped streets—some so narrow that the occupants of a house on one side of the road could reach across and shake hands with their neighbors on the other—came from fires and oil lamps gleaming through shutters barred against the cold. The town, so crowded and alive with noise during the day, would have been much quieter by night. With the exception of the ritualistic clatter of a militia company on guard, most of the roads would be deserted but for the hunched and huddled figures of drinkers flitting along alleyways, heading for the smoky warmth of their favorite tavern.