Tulipomania - Mike Dash [59]
Most serious of all were a handful of cases of outright fraud, which were perhaps inevitable in a market as rich and as poorly regulated as the bulb trade. When tulips of the same variety could often differ quite substantially in appearance, and a poor Viceroy could look much the same as a less valuable Violetten—say, an Admirael van Engeland—it was often difficult to distinguish between real deceit and genuine mistakes, and certainly the legal archives of the Dutch Republic appear to contain few cases that were proven. But Waermondt, in the Samenspraecken, said he had spoken to his cousin, who had experience of the tulip trade, and been told of people who paid for Witte Croonen and received instead worthless unicolored tulips. Of course, because all bulbs looked much the same, frauds such as this were discovered only when the tulips flowered in the spring.
But though problems such as these concerned more conservative and cautious Dutchmen, the florists who flocked to trade in tulips in the autumn of 1636 focused almost solely on the money they were making. Because demand for bulbs was growing day by day, prices were rising more and more quickly; by this time, as the contemporary chronicler Lieuwe van Aitzema recorded, everything that could be called a tulip—even bulbs that had been considered so useless that they had been thrown away on dunghills only months before—was now worth money.
In most respects all that was required for the boom in tulip prices to turn into a full-fledged mania was now in place. Many different varieties had been created, some much coveted but scarce, others less desirable but easier to obtain. A small group of professional gardeners existed to breed new flowers and supply at least some of the demand for the existing ones. A larger group of competent and enthusiastic amateurs, certainly several hundred strong, were also growing tulips in their own gardens, so the flowers could already be found in almost every town. The rules of trading had been established, and there were criteria for measuring a flower’s worth and allotting it a place on a scale that ran from superbly fine to rude. The traders and growers who dominated the trade had been joined by thousands of florists willing to sell everything they owned for bulbs. Finally, prices were higher than they had ever been before. All that was needed now was a way of bringing aspiring tulip dealers together: a place in which to trade.
CHAPTER 11
At the Sign of The Golden Grape
Right in the heart of Amsterdam, almost on top of the dam that actually gave the town its name, was an elegant four-story quadrangle, built in the Flemish style and crowned with a slim and elegant clock tower. This building stood opposite the central bank and close to the town hall in a position that emphasized the central role it played in the life of the city and indeed the United Provinces as a whole. It was Amsterdam’s new beurs—the city’s stock exchange.
Not too many years before, the traders who now occupied one or other of the 123 offices in the exchange had been forced to transact their business out in the open on Amsterdam’s New Bridge or—if wet—among the pews of St. Olaf’s Chapel or the town’s Old Church. As the city boomed in the early years of the seventeenth century, however, and foreign trade poured in, it became clear that the stock exchange needed a permanent and weatherproof home. The beurs, which opened for business in 1610, met that need and, by its sheer physical presence, went some way to assuaging the suspicions of Amsterdam’s more conservative burghers, who felt there was something faintly