Tulipomania - Mike Dash [76]
Certainly rumors that the markets could rise no higher were already in the air before February 3, and some buyers were no longer confident that their investments would yield a profit. As early as the end of December, an apothecary and bulb grower named Henricus Munting, who lived in the town of Groningen, was able to complete a lucrative deal to sell a handful of his tulips for seven thousand guilders to a man from Alkmaar only by promising his nervous customer that if prices fell before the summer of 1637, he could cancel the purchase and pay no more than 10 percent of the agreed price. Then, two days before the crash, at a dinner party held at Pieter Wynants’s house in Haarlem, Pieter’s younger brother Henrik tried to badger one of the guests into buying a pound of Switsers for 1,350 guilders. Henrik’s target was a rich widow named Geertruyt Schoudt, but she demurred and could not be persuaded to buy. It was only when another dinner guest, a local dyer named Jacob de Block, offered to guarantee the price for eight days that Schoudt gave way and bought the bulbs.
The collapse of the tulip trade after February 3 was so complete that virtually no information has survived concerning the sort of prices paid for bulbs in the spring of 1637. It would appear that the only buyers left in the market were the connoisseurs and perhaps a few rich florists who were not entirely dependent on flowers for their wealth, and that only the rarest and most superbly fine varieties had any chance at all of being sold. According to one contemporary, a tulip that had been worth 5,000 guilders before the crash was sold later for only 50 guilders. In May a bed of tulips that would have fetched 600 to 1,000 guilders in January is said to have changed hands for 6 guilders, and a selection of bulbs worth about 400 guilders during the boom was sold for a mere 22 guilders one stuiver. These prices suggest that where tulips could be sold at all, they fetched, at best, just over 5 percent of their old values, and often 1 percent or less. There can be no doubt, then, that this was a truly spectacular crash. Even if it was not more or less instantaneous in each of the towns affected by the mania—and it probably was—the collapse of the tulip trade certainly cannot have taken more than three or four months. It was far more rapid and complete than history’s most notorious financial disaster, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it. In that case it took more than two years for share prices to fall to a low, and even then they retained 20 percent of their old value.
Amid all the confusion few florists seem to have understood exactly why the bulb trade had collapsed in such spectacular fashion. Yet in retrospect it is not difficult to see that the crash was all but inevitable. Like a sun, tulip mania burned brightly and steadily while there was still fuel to feed it in the shape of a steady supply of bulbs. But during the winter of 1636–37 demand for tulips comprehensively outstripped supply, and the mania then began, in effect, to consume everything around it. Pound goods and unicolored tulips were pressed into circulation, and in a market where even the hitherto despised Switsers and Witte Croonen were selling for more than a thousand guilders a pound, the florists of Holland were dealing every last bulb they could lay their hands on.
Once even these vodderij were being traded, there were no longer any new varieties coming onto the market at affordable prices. The absence of cheap bulbs meant, in turn, that it was all but impossible for more novice florists to enter the market, for who could afford to do so if the very cheapest lots were selling for dozens or even hundreds of guilders? A handful of the existing traders were even selling up and trying to take their profits, so a shrinking group of florists, possessed of only a limited amount of capital, were somehow sustaining a constant rapid rise in prices. Sooner or later even those who still believed the trade was