Tulipomania - Mike Dash [64]
The florists of the city, cloistered in a back room of The Golden Grape away from the worst noise and smell of the city and the tavern itself, met by arrangement two or three times a week. In the early days of the tulip trade, these meetings took an hour or two at most, but as the mania took hold, the colleges began to sit for longer periods, sometimes starting in the morning and not concluding the last of their business until the early hours of the next morning. Since each deal was celebrated with a call for wine—in itself a symbol of ostentation and wealth in what was a predominantly beer-drinking province—and since wine in Dutch taverns was served in vast pewter pitchers that held anything from two pints to one and a half gallons, the trade was conducted for the most part in a haze of inebriation. Doubtless this, combined with the bravado generated by groups of friends laughing and talking into the night, explains a good deal about the otherwise puzzling mechanisms of the mania.
In important respects the tavern colleges seem to have operated independently from the rest of the tulip trade. Their members, though they did include a few merchants and other affluent dealers, were drawn almost exclusively from the working classes. These men would have had little if any contact with the connoisseurs or established growers, and they generally possessed at best secondhand knowledge not only of tulips but also of finance, the stock exchange, and the way that regents and great merchants dealt shares and bought and sold commodities.
Many of the elaborate customs developed by the colleges seem to have been deliberately modeled on the methods of the stock exchange, a practice that must have heightened the florists’ sense of self-importance and also helped to persuade the tulip traders that they were involved in a genuine and properly regulated business. Bulbs were put up for sale by auction, and where the more established growers and dealers sometimes visited a local attorney and had their agreements notarized so as to ensure there was no possibility of any dispute, the florists substituted the quicker and cheaper system of recording all their transactions in their own bulky ledgers. Each college also elected a secretary, who kept records of the deals struck around his table.
The tulips that were bought and sold by these tavern traders were rarely if ever the superbly fine varieties that obsessed the connoisseurs and wealthy dealers such as Jan Quaeckel. Probably they were bulbs of the second rank at first; and then, when demand rose further and even these became scarce, the colleges started to deal mostly in the least coveted and most common varieties of tulip. These flowers were known as vodderij, which means “rags,” or more politely as gemeene goed, “common goods.” They were unicolored or poorly variegated tulips that were often descendants of the earliest varieties to reach the United Provinces. Being both long-established and beneath the notice of the richer dealers, they were readily available by the end of 1636.
The vodderij were sold not by the ace but in baskets that were weighed out by the half-pound or the pound (9,728 aces in Haarlem, 10,240 in Amsterdam). In florists’ slang they were often called “pound goods,” to distinguish them from the piece goods that were sold individually by the ace or by the thousand aces. A one-pound basket might contain as many as fifty or one hundred bulbs, and so a single tulip, even at the height of the mania, would have been priced within reach of all but the poorest traders.
The hundreds of novice florists who flocked to the bulb trade in the autumn and winter of 1636–37 generally began by dealing in small quantities of pound goods, and the fantastic inflation that quickly occurred in