Tulipomania - Mike Dash [62]
Alighting from their barge just outside the city walls, travelers from Amsterdam would find themselves standing at a gate called the Amsterdamsepoort. Here Haarlem’s regents had erected a set of gallows, a triangle of three brick pillars joined by iron beams, and some wooden posts to which were strapped the bodies of recently executed criminals. Because the city was the home of the official executioner for the whole province—a man who bore the title “master of high works of Holland”—and saw to the dispatch of prisoners from Amsterdam as well as its own criminals, these contraptions would probably be full. When Sir William Brereton passed this way in 1634, he encountered not only the fleshless skeletons of two unfortunates swinging from the gallows, but also the mutilated body of a girl who had been broken on the wheel for murdering her own child and the blackened corpse of a beggar who had been burned at the stake for setting a whole village ablaze.
Entering the city through the Amsterdamsepoort, the visitor’s first impression would probably be of Haarlem’s distinctive smell. The city stank of buttermilk and malt, the aromas of its two principal industries: bleaching and beer. Haarlem breweries produced a fifth of all the beer made in Holland, and the town’s celebrated linen bleacheries, just outside the walls, used hundreds of gallons of buttermilk a day to dye cloth shipped to the city from all over Europe a dazzling white. The milk filled a series of huge bleaching pits along the west walls, and each evening it was drained off into Haarlem’s moat and thence into the river Spaarne, dyeing the waters white.
Night draws in quickly in the Dutch Republic by late autumn, and it would have been dark by the time travelers from outside the city found their way to the market square. In 1636 Haarlem did not yet enjoy more than rudimentary street lighting, and the only light in its maze of cramped streets—some so narrow that the occupants of a house on one side of the road could reach across and shake hands with their neighbors on the other—came from fires and oil lamps gleaming through shutters barred against the cold. The town, so crowded and alive with noise during the day, would have been much quieter by night. With the exception of the ritualistic clatter of a militia company on guard, most of the roads would be deserted but for the hunched and huddled figures of drinkers flitting along alleyways, heading for the smoky warmth of their favorite tavern.
It would have been smoke, more than warmth, that assailed the patrons of The Golden Grape as they entered the inn. The eye-watering fug that permeated every seventeenth-century tavern was so thick, it was often difficult to see across a room. Part of it, certainly, came from the roaring open fires that were the only form of heating, but they were fueled by local peat—excavated in such huge quantities that the Dutch of the Golden Age were creating new swamps and bogs almost as fast as they drained the old ones—piled up in hollow pyramids in the grate. Visitors such as Peter Mundy found that Netherlands peat burned “very Sweet and Cleare,” even though the sulfur in it did turn those huddled around fires “pale and livid, like ghosts.” So the smoke that filled The Golden Grape came almost entirely from the pipes smoked by its customers.
By 1636 pipe smoking was so prevalent among the Dutch that it was practically a national characteristic. Tobacco, mostly imported from America but just now beginning to be grown in the United Provinces too, was puffed in slim, long-stemmed clay pipes. Smokers smoked almost constantly, not least because the doctors of the period touted tobacco as a