Tulipomania - Mike Dash [61]
It was only the larger and more reputable inns, however, that would have been able to offer the private rooms required by the tulip traders. They went by names such as the Beelzebub, the Finch, the Lion, and the Devil on a Chain. Establishments of this sort could be found both within and without a city’s walls.
In Haarlem, for example, many taverns clustered to the south of the city, amid the glades and walks of Haarlem’s famous woods. Because they were close to the earliest tulip farms just to the north, it seems reasonable to assume that some of them, at least, must have hosted groups of florists trading bulbs. If so, then the tulip dealers would have shared the premises with unsavory companions. Prostitution having been outlawed—ostensibly at least—within Haarlem’s city walls, the taverns of the Haarlemmerhout frequently doubled as brothels. The most notorious of the local whorehouses cannot have been easy to miss—it appears in the records of the time as “the red house outside the gate of the cross.”
We do not know for certain how many of the dozens of taverns in Haarlem itself played host to the tulip maniacs of 1636, but it seems a fair guess that one that did was a large and well-known inn called De Gulde Druyf, which occupied a prime location on the corner of the market square and the city’s main street, the Koningsstraat. This tavern—the name means “The Golden Grape”—was owned by the brothers Jan and Cornelis Quaeckel, though they did not run it day to day. The Quaeckel brothers were the sons of an innkeeper named Cornelis Gerritsz. Quaeckel, who had been one of the most important pioneer tulip growers in Holland. At least five new varieties of tulip, created by him in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, bore the Quaeckel name in honor of his achievements, including the white and violet Lack van Quaeckel and a popular Bizarden named Mervelye van Quaeckel—“Quaeckel’s miracle.” Old Quaeckel died, aged almost seventy, in 1632, but his youngest son, Jan, continued to be active in the tulip business up to and beyond the peak of the mania. Nothing could have been more natural than for him to have played host to Haarlem’s traders in a back room of his own tavern, which was not only perfectly situated but also one of the most popular watering holes in Haarlem.
Suppose, then, that we were to travel from Amsterdam to pay a visit to The Golden Grape one day in the late autumn of 1636 and watch tulip traders at work. What would we have seen? Leaving Amsterdam late in the afternoon and traveling, perhaps, along the newly opened passenger canal that linked the two cities—the first of its kind in the United Provinces—visitors would arrive at Haarlem at dusk. The journey from one city to another took only two and a quarter hours. It was so quick and so convenient that fashionable Amsterdammers soon found it easier to send their dirty washing by boat to the superior laundries of Haarlem than to do it themselves. Those on board the canal boats passed the time discussing current affairs and reading specially produced small pamphlets called schuitepraatjes, or “towboat talks.” During the autumn and winter of 1636, the new brightly colored barges would certainly have been hotbeds of gossip about the latest developments in the tulip mania.
As the boat approached Haarlem, the travelers’ first glimpse of the city would be of a long line of red-brown roofs, crowned with wisps of smoke from many thousands of chimneys, rising clear of the meadowlands that surrounded the town. Next they would see that a low perimeter wall of brick and a defensive moat spanned by nine bridges protected the city. Far to the west, beyond the roofscape, the ragged outlines of the giant sand dunes that lined the North Sea coast might just be seen rising to meet the characteristic soft gray sky of Holland. And to the south they would glimpse the grim black expanse