Tulipomania - Mike Dash [80]
In promoting this compromise the growers were rather cynically attempting to minimize the losses that they faced. The majority of the bulbs that were sold before the end of November, they knew, had been bought by connoisseurs and wealthy dealers who had the means to pay their debts in full. It was only in December and January that poorer florists had flooded into the market as the tulip trade exploded and full-fledged mania took hold. Obtaining payment from these people would be a very different matter, and the resolution agreed at Amsterdam recognized that fact.
In the Samenspraecken Waermondt explains to Gaergoedt how the growers’ plan would work in practice. If a bulb sold originally for 30 guilders had been resold three times, say for 60, 100, and 200 guilders, then the man who had offered 200 guilders had the choice of handing over the money and keeping the flower. If he no longer wanted it, he would have to pay 20 guilders to the man who had sold it to him in order to have their agreement annulled. The right of ownership would then revert to the florist who had bid 100 guilders, and he in turn would have to choose whether to keep the bulb for himself or pay compensation of 10 guilders to the man from whom he had purchased the tulip. Waermondt does not say so, but presumably the growers’ intention was that if any one contract was settled in full, all those beneath it in the chain—including the original sale agreed by the grower—would also be honored. If none of the florists wanted to keep the bulb, possession would revert to the grower, who would receive 10 percent of the sale price as compensation. He then had every right to sell the tulip to another buyer if he could.
The reasons why the growers of Amsterdam declined to ratify this agreement are not known, but it is quite conceivable that they were shocked by the sheer scale of the surrender that their fellow growers were proposing. After all, the bulb farmers had every right, in the eyes of the law, to pursue claims to full payment for their produce. Only sheer pragmatism, the knowledge that it would be a sheer waste of time to pursue hundreds of insolvent debtors through the courts, can have persuaded the majority to voluntarily sign away their right to what must, in many cases, have been thousands of guilders. Ten percent—by which they meant one-tenth of the original sale price, not the final value of the tulips when the mania reached its peak—must have been all most bulb farmers believed they had a chance of recovering from the disaster.
The growers’ problem was that even this modest demand for part payment lacked the force of law. They could ask their customers to consider the compromise, but they could not require them to accept it. And since most florists could not hope to find enough money to cover even one-tenth of their liabilities unless they were paid for the bulbs they in turn had sold to others, there was little prospect of many of them coming to terms with the growers unless they had to. “When my buyer pays me, I will pay you,” Gaergoedt assures a creditor in the Samenspraecken. Then he adds an ominous caveat: “But he is nowhere to be found.”
It was thus evident that the bulb trade’s troubles could not be resolved by the bulb trade alone. Some higher authority would have to rule on who owned the thousands of tulips bought and sold before February 1637—and more importantly, who should pay for them. Whatever compromise was finally proposed, moreover, would need to have the force of law.
The mania had become a problem for the courts. But while the tulip’s case was being heard, the