by Mike Dash
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.
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.
CHAPTER 11
At the Sign of The Golden Grape
Right 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 apotheca
ries’ 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.