Tulipomania - Mike Dash [48]
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