Tulipomania - Mike Dash [55]
The earliest record of selling by the ace dates to the beginning of December 1634, when the Haarlem grower David de Mildt went with a linen worker named Jan Ocksz. to the garden owned by Jan van Damme on the Kleine Houtweg. On de Mildt’s advice, Ocksz. purchased two Goudas weighing thirty aces for thirty stuivers—one and a half guilders—per ace. He also bought two Admirael van der Eijcks, paying not by the ace but 132 guilders for each tulip, which suggests that the old system of dealing by the bulb was still in use in 1634. By 1635, however, all surviving records refer to bulbs sold by the ace.
As the tulip trade grew in confidence and complexity, florists occasionally elaborated on this basic system. It was, for example, possible to purchase bulbs on condition that they had reached a minimum weight by the time they were lifted. In another case that involved David de Mildt, a Haarlem clog maker named Henrick Lucasz. bought two tulips—a Rosen variety, Saeyblom van Coningh, and a Violetten named Latour—at an auction organized by one Joost van Haverbeeck at the end of October 1635. With de Mildt as a witness, Lucasz. agreed to pay thirty guilders for the Saeyblom and twenty-seven guilders for the Latour, but with the guarantee that the bulbs would weigh at least seven and a half aces and sixteen aces respectively when lifted. But at lifting time they were found to weigh no more than two aces and about thirteen aces, so Lucasz. asked van Haverbeeck to return the money he had paid in advance. Van Haverbeeck, a Haarlem dealer possessed of a notoriously short temper, indignantly refused to make a refund, and the matter ended up in the hands of a lawyer. (If anything, Lucasz. escaped relatively lightly. The records of the time show that van Haverbeeck and his equally abrasive father repeatedly issued violent threats against some of their customers and were the principal suspects when the valuable tulips growing in de Mildt’s garden were vandalized in the winter of 1635.)
Other variations were also possible. A few poorer florists bought shares in expensive bulbs. On one occasion, an Amsterdam grower, Jan Admirael, sold a half share in three bulbs to a customer named Simon van Poelenburch. On another, Admirael entered into a complicated deal with a dealer named Marten Creitser, agreeing to swap several tulips and 180 guilders in cash for eleven paintings and an engraving owned by Creitser.
Nevertheless, the introduction of pricing by the ace did not mean that tulips of a given variety now cost the same everywhere within the Dutch Republic. Since even the most important messages could travel no faster than a man on horseback, there was no way to communicate changes in price quickly and accurately from place to place and thus no single market for tulips. Instead, each town involved in the bulb trade valued flowers slightly differently; some places were generally expensive, others cheap.
Other factors added to the general chaos in pricing. Not only did individual florists have preferences of their own, they were also influenced by which tulips had just been bought and which sold, by which were in fashion and which were becoming more