Tulipomania - Mike Dash [56]
The rapid increase in bulb prices in 1635 and the first half of 1636 had important consequences. Wealthy growers and dealers who had hitherto traded bulbs only to connoisseurs or among themselves recognized that there were new opportunities to make money. They began to offer their flowers to the florists who were streaming into the market. Then as a next step, some banded together so as to maximize their capital or improve the variety of stock they had to offer. A number of companies were formed to trade in bulbs. In September 1635, for example, the Haarlem merchant Cornelius Bol the Younger went into partnership with a grower named Jan Coopall; Bol contributed no less than 8,746 guilders 2 stuivers to the capital of the company. And in December 1636 the Haarlemmers Henrick Jacobsz. and Roeland Verroustraeten went into business with Philips Jansz. and Matthijs Bloem of Amsterdam. The articles of their company explained in some detail how the business would operate. The thirty-five-year-old Verroustraeten, who was probably already an experienced trader, was the only one authorized to deal in bulbs, and he would buy and sell tulips with money put up by the other three directors. All four directors agreed to trade only on behalf of the company and never on their own account.
By the autumn of 1636 both the tulip companies and the professional growers must have been thinking carefully about what stock to plant for the next season. The most valuable flowers—the Admiraels, Generaels, Generalissimos, and their kin—were already too expensive for many florists to afford, and the poorer traders at the bottom of the market had begun to ask for less favored tulips that were available in greater quantity and were significantly cheaper. Like the superbly fine varieties that had been the basis of the bulb trade in the early 1630s, these flowers were termed “piece goods”—that is, tulips that were bought and sold as single bulbs—but because their prices were low, they were quoted not by the ace but in multiples of a thousand aces. Varieties sold in this way included several that became famous in their own right later on, such as the vermilion-streaked Rotgans and Oudenaers and the unusual white-on-purple Lack van Rhijn.
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