Tulipomania - Mike Dash [49]
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 while 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