Tulipomania - Mike Dash [71]
There does not seem to have been any doubt in the mind of Dutch tulip traders that the auction at Alkmaar was an extraordinary event that deserved to be commemorated. Within a few days of the sale, a one-page pamphlet with the modest title List of Some Tulips Sold to the Highest Bidder on February 5th 1637 had gone on sale. It gave a few brief details of the circumstances of the auction and listed the prices paid for each of the ninety-nine lots. Some writers have suggested that this pamphlet was meant as a warning against extravagance, but its principal purpose would appear to have been to boost confidence in the tulip trade by making as many people as possible aware of the phenomenal prices that bulbs were now commanding.
In this it was at least partially successful. The pamphlet attained a sufficiently wide circulation for the prices it listed to be regarded as in some way official, even typical. A number of contemporary tulip books that actually indicate the cost of various varieties give the prices attained at Alkmaar, even though they were far in excess of anything that had been realized earlier in the mania. (The idea, presumably, was to persuade potential purchasers that they should pay high prices.) Thus Admirael Liefkens, the most expensive tulip purchased at the auction in terms of guilders paid per ace, had been worth only six guilders twelve stuivers per ace in June 1636, and Winkel’s three Admirael van der Eijcks—bulbs of a variety that had sold at two guilders ten stuivers per ace the previous July—went for as much as seven guilders fourteen stuivers per ace at Alkmaar.
Tulip mania reached its peak throughout the United Provinces in the last week of January and the first week of February 1637. During this extraordinary fortnight huge amounts of money were pledged in mere moments. Hendrick Pietersz., a baker from Haarlem, paid a hundred guilders for a Gouda weighing just seven aces—a price of more than fourteen guilders per ace, one of the highest ever recorded for a tulip. And extracts from the trading ledger of a Haarlem merchant named Bartholomeus van Gennep, preserved in the legal archives of his city, show that late in January he agreed to pay a single dealer, Abraham Versluys, more than 3,200 guilders for a collection of second-rate bulbs that included none of the highly coveted varieties most commonly associated with the mania:
Two pounds of Yellow and Red Crowns 385 guilders
A pound of Switsers 280 guilders
3,000 aces of Centen 380 guilders
Half a pound of Oudenaers 1,430 guilders
1,000 aces of Le Grands 480 guilders
1,000 aces of Gevleugelde Coornharts 220 guilders
70 aces of Kistemaecker 12 guilders
410 aces of Gevlamde Nieulant 54 guilders
3,241 guilders
Moreover, though the passion for bulb dealing was still concentrated in its oldest strongholds, Haarlem and Amsterdam, it had now reached beyond the borders of Holland and West Friesland, certainly to Utrecht and Groningen and most probably to other provinces as well. Indeed, the horticulturalist Abraham Munting (who was a boy during the mania) noted, without giving details, that speculation in tulips was raging, for a second time, in northern France as well.
The number of people involved in buying and selling tulips across the United Provinces must by now have been fairly considerable. One of the few detailed documents that has survived suggests that in the city of Utrecht, which was far from being one of the largest centers of the bulb trade, there were only about forty serious growers in February 1637. This almost certainly means that a couple of hundred florists and hangers-on also traded in the town. Since bulb growing and flower dealing flourished in at least a dozen cities and districts in Holland alone,