Tulipomania - Mike Dash [75]
In all likelihood every one of the traders present had paid similar prices for similar bulbs within the past few days in anticipation of selling again for another handsome profit. Now, in a matter of no more than a minute or so, their assumptions had been shattered. The ugly question of what would become of the bulb trade had been raised. Plainly it would have been impossible to continue with the normal business of the day. Perhaps some brief attempt was made to sell other bulbs, without success, but the college must have suspended trading almost immediately, and in the general confusion one or two of the assembled company no doubt ran to inform their friends and family of what had occurred. In no time all the colleges in Haarlem would have heard the news, and every florist in the town and beyond the walls would have been gripped by a simple impulse: Sell.
It took only a few days for the panic to spread through the rest of the United Provinces. In college after college and in town after town, desperate florists discovered that flowers that had been worth thousands of guilders only a day or two before now could not be sold for any price. A few dealers kept their heads and tried to stimulate renewed interest by organizing mock auctions or offering bulbs at huge discounts, but they were ignored. In most places the tavern trade crashed so completely that it was not even a question of prices falling to a quarter or a tenth of what they had been when the mania was at its peak. The market for tulips simply ceased to exist.
Many florists must have found themselves in the same plight as Gaergoedt, the weaver described by the author of the Samenspraecken. Caught out by the unexpected fall in prices, Gaergoedt’s first reaction is to go out to buy and sell again. He retains some of his old confidence, telling his friend Waermondt: “Flora may be ill, but she will not die.” While his wife, Christijntje, bewails her husband’s decision to sell off his loom and all his weaving tools, Gaergoedt returns to the colleges, only to find that the market really has collapsed and all trading has come to a halt. Unable to find a single buyer for his bulbs, and conscious of the many debts he has incurred in buying tulips and laying out a garden, the hapless weaver asks his friend what he should do. Waermondt’s advice is brutally straightforward: The tulip trade is dead, he says, there is no chance of reviving it, and the florists have no option but to return to their old jobs and their proper stations. The best they can hope for is to be given the opportunity to discharge their debts honorably.
Confidence is everything in a booming market, but the fact that the tulip trade collapsed so rapidly suggests that some of the less sanguine florists must have been feeling uneasy about the continual escalation of bulb prices a few days before the crash. The mania took place before the introduction of daily newspapers, so there is no way of being certain of the sequence of events in the final week of January and the first few days of February, but it is unlikely that bulb dealing ceased completely and without warning simply because of one failed auction in a single Haarlem college. Trading must surely have become more and more difficult everywhere in Holland over the previous week or so; auctioneers would have found it harder and harder to push prices up at the old rapid rate, some varieties would have peaked in value, and the number of dealers anxious to sell would have begun to outnumber those still willing to buy. In the day or two before the fateful meeting at Haarlem, it is not too fanciful to suppose that a general feeling of unease and trepidation must have descended upon the colleges of Haarlem and Amsterdam like a clammy autumn fog rolling in off the Zuider Zee. The tulip traders