Tulipomania - Mike Dash [57]
Few details of the frenzied trading that took place as the tulip boom peaked in the last two or three months of 1636 have survived, but a short series of pamphlets containing a fictionalized account of the tavern trade—published in Haarlem at the beginning of 1637—are agreed to be both reliable and representative of what actually occurred. These are the three Samenspraeck tusschen Waermondt ende Gaergoedt (“Conversations between Truemouth and Greedygoods”), written by an unknown author and published by Adriaen Roman, the principal printer then living in Haarlem.
The Gaergoedt of the pamphlets is a weaver who has abandoned his craft to become a florist. He has mortgaged all the tools of his trade to provide himself with working capital, and he now travels from town to town dealing in bulbs. On a rare visit home he meets his old colleague Waermondt, who has yet to become involved in the burgeoning craze, and offers him wine and beer. Then Gaergoedt attempts to persuade his friend to enrich himself by buying and selling tulips. At present, he points out, Waermondt struggles to make a profit of 10 percent on his business. With tulips he will make 100 percent or more: “Yes, ten for one, a hundred for one, and sometimes a thousand.”
The Samenspraecken take a predictably moralistic view of the tulip trade. Gaergoedt is hubristic and sublimely, stupidly confident that the price of bulbs will go on rising forever. He boasts that he has already earned a fortune from his flowers and that he pays his way through life with bulbs. His friends—gardeners and other weavers—are also rich and drive from town to town and from college to college in richly decorated coaches.
Waermondt, whom the anonymous pamphleteer casts in the role of bemused but honest beginner, finds it hard to believe that a mere weaver can make such sums, and under his questioning Gaergoedt is forced to admit that he has yet to receive most of the money due to him as a result of his successful trading—his profits cannot be realized until the tulips are lifted again the next summer. Still, he says, “this trade goes steady,” and another two or three years in the bulb market will more than set him up for the rest of his life. Then, he says, he will use his profits to buy a brewery, a bailiwick, even a lordship.
Waermondt is incredulous; the whole thing, he thinks, is just too good to be true. He wonders how the common people caught up in the tulip craze dare risk all the money they are borrowing against the profits of the trade. And though he is certainly tempted by the talk of money, he tells his friend he prefers not to take the risk of plunging into the flower business.
In the autumn of 1636 many Dutchmen must have thought, like Waermondt, that the profits being made on tulips were simply too good to be true. But thousands did not, and they took their savings and mortgaged their goods in order to take part in the hurly-burly of the bulb trade.
Most had little access to ready money, but the traders and florists who were already in the market saw an opportunity to sell their flowers to novices who had little understanding of which tulips were valuable and which were not, and it quickly became customary to accept deposits not in cash but in kind. For florists whose wealth—what there was of it—was tied up in their possessions, this meant paying for bulbs with whatever came to hand. The fictional Gaergoedt offered deposits ranging from cloth enough to make a coat and suit to a quarter of prunes. Real florists paid in tools, clothes, and household goods if they were artisans, farm animals or crops if they were farmers, paintings and other luxuries if they were rich. The balance of the purchase price was payable only on delivery, which took place at lifting time. On occasion payment terms could be even more flexible; one agreement, in which the Haarlem shopkeeper Aert Ducens sold his entire garden to a local gentleman