Tulipomania - Mike Dash [50]
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