Tulipomania

by Mike Dash

  Sometime before 1635 the very first florists began to realize a profit from what had probably been rather tentative initial investments in flower bulbs. Word of their good fortune spread, and a few more newcomers decided to try their luck in the tulip trade as well. The writers and pamphleteers of the time are unanimous in stating that many of the incomers were weavers, who enjoyed certain advantages over other artisans in that their looms were worth a fair sum and could be pawned or mortgaged to raise the seed capital needed to enter the bulb trade, but they were soon joined by men from other professions. The anonymous author of one pamphlet (who could well have been employing a certain amount of poetic license) suggested that people from almost every imaginable walk of life became tulip dealers: bricklayers and carpenters, glass blowers and confectioners, dry shavers and bookbinders, swineherds and demolition men—even members of the professional classes, such as lawyers, printers, and clergymen.

  Almost every sort of artisan, then, had the desire to get rich, and at least some of them would have had the capital required to make a modest investment in bulbs. The chancers would have had less money but a greater willingness to risk what they did possess. Here two of the most striking characteristics of Dutch society came into play: the urge to save and the urge to gamble. These impulses may seem quite contradictory, but in fact they worked together to fuel the tulip mania.

  Many visitors to the United Provinces were struck by the national horror of living beyond one’s means, which—when combined with the general increase in wealth that the republic enjoyed between 1600 and 1630—meant that (perhaps uniquely among all the people of Europe in this period) a significant number of Dutch families had savings. Because there were no banks, in the modern sense, in the republic at this time, we have no idea what sort of figures were typical, but Sir William Temple, for one, appears to have thought that a frugal Dutchman might save a fifth of his total income. If we take that as a guide, then a reasonably well-off artisan earning between 300 and 500 guilders a year might be expected to have had between 60 and 100 guilders a year to invest. Of course the working classes lived much closer to the poverty line than the merchants whom Temple had in mind when he made his estimate, so it is probably rather optimistic to use even his rough figure; but even so, it was surely possible that a family in which both parents worked consistently and tried hard to save money might scrape together 20 or 50 guilders at the end of a good year. In normal times that money would probably be spent on luxuries such as linen, household furniture, and a few pieces of china, but even after tulip prices had appreciated throughout the 1620s, it would also have sufficed to buy a few bulbs.

  Like saving, the urge to gamble infected all classes of society. No Dutchman, the businessman Willem Usselincx said, would put his money into an old sock when he could use it to make more money. For a rich merchant this might have meant investing what he could afford in a risky voyage to the Indies. For the rest of society betting was often a product of the difficulties, which have already been noted, that many Dutchmen experienced in trying to better themselves in an overcrowded country. Lotteries, for example, were as popular in the Holland of the Golden Age as they are today, and for many people winning some wager seemed an enticingly simple way of making some money.

  The Dutch were notorious for their addiction to gambling. The French traveler Charles Ogier wrote that it was impossible to find a porter to carry one’s luggage at Rotterdam, because as soon as a visitor had chosen one, another would arrive and play dice with the first for the client’s business. Contemporary records mention that a man named Barent Bakker won a life-threatening bet that he could sail in a kneading trough down the Zuider Zee from the island of Texel to Wieringen, and a Bleiswijck innkeeper named Abraham van der Stain lost his house on a wager concerning the precise appearance of a specific pillar in Rome. Dutch soldiers were even observed making odds on the outcome of battles that were still in progress.

  Compared to such insane wagers, tulips looked like a good investment. Growing bulbs was a lot easier than working an eighty-hour week hammering horseshoes or working a loom, and because demand for the flowers was steadily increasing, prices, at least for the finer varieties, consistently rose. No wonder Dutchmen thought they had chanced upon the dream of every gambler: a safe bet.

  CHAPTER 10

  Boom

  Deep inside the long, low-lying cordon of islands that separated the northern provinces of the Dutch Republic from the North Sea stood the West Friesland town of Hoorn. It was a port of moderate size, built upon a sheltered bay that faced south onto the Zuider Zee, the huge inland sea that cut the United Provinces almost in two. Until the 1550s Hoorn had been one of the most important places in the Netherlands, thriving on the Baltic trade. Now, nearly one hundred years later, the ships that had once unloaded cargoes of hemp and timber at its docks sailed on to Amsterdam. Hoorn was dying; the port had slipped into a long, slow decline from which it was never to recover.

  Somewhere in the center of this ruined town, in the first half of the seventeenth century, stood a house with three stone tulips carved into its facade. There was nothing else special about the building, apart from the fact that it was eventually converted into a Catholic church. But this was where the tulip mania began.

  The stone flowers were placed there to commemorate the sale of the house, in the summer of 1633, for three rare tulips. It was in this year, according to the chronicle of a local historian named Theodorus Velius, that the price of bulbs reached unprecedented heights in West Friesland. When news of the sale of the tulip house got out, a Frisian farmhouse and its adjoining land also changed hands for a parcel of bulbs.

  These remarkable transactions, which took place in a part of the United Provinces that had been badly battered by a recession, were the first sign that something approaching a mania had begun to flourish. For three decades flower lovers had used money to buy tulips. Now—for the first time—tulips were being used as money. And just as strikingly, they were being valued at huge sums.

  It is difficult to be certain how significant the sale of the tulip house was without knowing what sort of flowers were involved in the sale. But even though the price of homes in West Friesland might not have been high compared with those in Amsterdam, a decent-sized house within the walls of Hoorn would hardly have changed hands for less than five hundred guilders or so, and good-quality farmland would probably have been more expensive than that; the value of each bulb would therefore have been high by the standards of the time. It is true that bulb prices had been rising for some years before 1633, and some equally startling transactions of which no record has survived may have taken place in earlier years; it is also likely that if a farm really did change hands for some bulbs, the man who sold it was a connoisseur landowner who possessed many other properties and passed this one on to an equally wealthy acquaintance complete with a sitting tenant, rather than a farmer disposing of his only means of earning a living. Yet even so these transactions were on a much larger scale than anything that had taken place in the 1620s.

  The flower trade was changing too. The bulbs that were bought and sold in the 1630s were not out-and-out rarities such as Semper Augustus, which could not be obtained for any sum, but other superbly fine varieties and, later, tulips of a lesser quality, most of which— while available only in limited numbers—could be bought from professional growers who would sell them to anyone who could pay their prices. And as the number of people attracted to the bulb trade increased, the price of the most favored varieties began to rise: slowly at first, but more rapidly from the end of 1634. This acceleration continued through 1635 until, by the winter of 1636, the value of some bulbs could double in little more than a week.

  The tulip mania climaxed in just two mad months: December 1636 and January 1637. In those few weeks people and money poured into the tulip trade as Dutchmen across the United Provinces rushed to invest whatever they possessed in bulbs. Naturally this sharp increase in demand pushed prices higher still. For a whil
e at least, everyone made money. And that attracted yet more novice florists to the trade.

  A contemporary chronicler gave some idea of the way prices rose. An Admirael de Man that had been bought for 15 guilders was resold for 175; one of the Bizarden, Gheel en Root van Leyde, increased in value twelvefold, from 45 guilders to a princely 550, and a Generalissimo tenfold, from 95 guilders to 900. The price of another superbly fine tulip, Generael der Generaelen van Gouda—the highly coveted “General of Generals,” a large flower with flaming scarlet stripes on a white ground whose unwieldy title was soon abbreviated, simply, to “Gouda”—rose by two-thirds between December 1634 and December 1635, then by a further 50 percent in the six months between December and May 1636. After that it tripled in value once again between June 1636 and January 1637, so that a bulb that was already expensive, priced at 100 guilders at the beginning of the boom, was worth no less than 750 just two years later.

  Naturally the prices quoted for a single bulb of the most celebrated of all tulips, Semper Augustus, rose sharply too—from 5,500 guilders a bulb in 1633 to an astonishing 10,000 guilders in the first month of 1637. The last sum mentioned could have been afforded only by a few dozen people in the whole of the Dutch Republic. It was enough to feed, clothe, and house a whole Dutch family for half a lifetime, or sufficient to purchase one of the grandest homes on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam for cash, complete with a coach house and an eighty-foot garden—and this at a time when homes in that city were as expensive as property anywhere in the world.

  Such profits were startling, even in a country where the economy had recovered from the recession of the 1620s and it was possible once again for money to be made in every profession from spice dealing to soap boiling. Those who tried the bulb trade and profited from it could not resist telling their friends and family about the source of their good fortune; the novelty and the implausibility of making money from flowers ensured that their stories were told and retold—losing, it is certain, nothing in the process. By the end of 1634 or the beginning of 1635, lurid tales of the money to be made in tulips were the talk of Holland.

  One such anecdote mentioned a piece of farmland on Schermer polder that changed hands for half a dozen flowers; another told of a man who was so addicted to the tulip trade that the woman he had planned to marry left him for another. A third story concerned a rich merchant from Amsterdam who was said to have purchased a fabulously rare Rosen bulb, which he put down for a moment on a counter in his warehouse. When he looked again, he discovered it had vanished, and his servants turned the place upside down in their search for the flower without success. Finally the merchant realized it must have been taken by a sailor—just returned from a three-year voyage to the East Indies and completely ignorant of the tulip craze—who had been in the warehouse at the time. He scoured Amsterdam for the man and eventually found him sitting on a coil of rope down at the docks and chewing on the last portions of the precious bulb, which he had mistaken for an onion. When the merchant realized what had happened, he had the sailor seized and thrown into prison. A fourth tale was told of an English traveler, similarly ignorant of tulips, who used his pocketknife to dissect a bulb he found lying in the conservatory of his wealthy Dutch host. Unfortunately for him, it proved to be an Admirael van der Eijck (a Rosen variety adorned with exceptionally strong, straight bloodred stripes) worth no less than four thousand guilders. The inquisitive Englishman, too, soon found himself hauled before the magistrates and made to pay for his transgression. Or so the story went.

  In truth, these and the welter of other anecdotes that circulated about the tulip trade were implausible at best, impossible at worst. Many were nothing more than common gossip, and the rest appear to have begun life as simple morality tales, spun perhaps in pulpits, which warned of the dangers of dealing in flowers. But if they were intended to deter people from dabbling in tulips, such tales of excess were anything but effective. They made bulbs seem desirable, profit certain. Excited talk about the money that could be made in the tulip trade drove more and more people to try it for themselves.

  What made so many people, from so many different professions, so keen to try their luck in a trade of which almost all of them were completely ignorant? The lure of profit, certainly, and the prospect of making far more money than they had ever had before. It helped, too, that the United Provinces was just emerging from a lengthy recession—that lasted for most of the 1620s and was the worst of the entire seventeenth century—caused in part by the renewal of the war with Spain and the effects of a Spanish blockade. This depression was followed by an increasingly feverish boom in the Dutch economy as a whole, which began in 1631 or 1632 and gathered pace toward the end of the decade and meant that in many cases there was more money around than ever before. Much more local factors, however, also had an impact. Many of the weavers who were drawn to the bulb trade came from the town of Haarlem, a dozen miles to the west of Amsterdam, where even the general boom could not prevent the linen business from falling into sharp decline as Leiden came to dominate the Dutch cloth industry.

  Another influence was a severe outbreak of bubonic plague that exactly coincided with the tulip mania, striking many Dutch cities between 1633 and 1637. The chronicler Theodorus Schrevelius, who lived in Haarlem throughout this period, recorded that the disease killed eight thousand of his fellow citizens between its first appearance in October 1635 and its eventual disappearance in July 1637. Of these more than 5,700 died of plague while the bulb trade was close to its height between August and November 1636—one in eight of the total population of the city, so many that there were not graves enough to hold the dead. The appalling impact of the plague had two significant consequences. One was that it created a shortage of labor and thus resulted in a rise in wages as employers competed for manpower; this would have helped to create surplus income that could be plowed into the bulb trade. The other—or so it has been suggested—was to create a mood of fatalism and desperation among the traders themselves, which may have contributed to the abandon with which they dealt their bulbs.

  Whether they were optimistic or fatalistic, the novice florists who did decide to try their luck in the tulip trade could hardly have hoped to possess a flower as valuable as a Gouda or an Admirael van der Eijck; they would have begun by buying and selling the cheapest available bulbs. The historian Simon Schama has suggested that newcomers were able to gain a foothold in what was already an expensive market because the professional growers happened to introduce an unusually large number of new varieties in 1634, which had the effect of depressing prices. There does not appear to be any direct evidence that this was the case, and anyway it was the newest—and thus scarcest—varieties that were generally also the most expensive. What seems more likely is that some of the older and more established tulips had multiplied by this date to the point where they became generally available and modestly priced. It was by buying and selling these flowers that the newcomers must have entered the market.

  Entering the tulip trade was simple. Investing in a few bulbs required having a little money and access to a nearby nursery but little else. In the first half of 1635, then, the market for bulbs began to flourish as never before throughout the United Provinces, springing up wherever tulips were readily available. Groups of florists emerged in every town where connoisseurs or growers were already well established: in Haarlem and Amsterdam; in Gouda and Rotterdam; in Utrecht and Delft, Leiden and Alkmaar; and in Enkhuizen, Medemblik, and Hoorn.

  The growers and the connoisseurs did more than simply provide the newcomers with stock. The trade they had created was already ordered and established. There were no arcane laws to master, no complications to be overcome. The rules for buying and selling flowers were based on simple common sense, and they were well known and well accepted long before the first florists began dealing in tulips.

  The earliest sales were probably by the bulb, but this changed as the number of available flowers increased, and it would appear that by 1610
some less valuable tulips were already being sold “by the bed,” a unit of exchange that does not seem to have been precisely defined. The legal archives of Haarlem contain the record of the sale, in 1611, of four beds of tulips planted by an apothecary called Joos to one Jan Brants, who paid the already considerable sum of two hundred guilders. The next year Brants bought two more beds of tulips that belonged jointly to a certain Dammis Pietersz. and a Haarlem brewer named Augustijn Steyn. They cost him another 450 guilders.

  Sometime after that (when is not clear) it became possible to buy and sell offsets as well as mother bulbs. This was an obvious next step, because logic dictated that offsets, which after all would soon become bulbs themselves, must be worth something in their own right. Nevertheless, this extension to the trade was fraught with difficulty because it was impossible to guarantee that offsets would mature satisfactorily or, as we have seen, that the tulips they produced would be identical to those of the mother bulb. Because of these problems, trading in offsets was something of a risk, and the idea took some time to win favor. When, in the spring of 1611, a Haarlem connoisseur named Andries Mahieu was asked if he would sell a linen merchant of his acquaintance some offshoots, he replied by asking his friend if he really wanted to buy “a cat in a bag.” This statement so imprinted itself in the mind of one bystander, the gardener Marten de Fort, that it survived to be recorded in the legal archives too.

  Trading offsets was significant for another reason. Clusius and the other early growers already knew that bulbous plants prosper best if they are lifted from the soil soon after the flowers of one season have fallen, then are dried off and preserved aboveground until autumn. The buying and selling of bulbs therefore occurred only during the summer months when the tulips were out of the ground and could be physically exchanged. Offsets, on the other hand, mature only over a period of several years, so it was tempting to sell them when they first appeared.