Tulipomania - Mike Dash [86]
None of these accusations stand up to scrutiny; indeed, there is no real evidence that any group—other than perhaps the tulip growers themselves—had promoted the bulb craze to further their own ends. It is true that some Mennonites had involved themselves in the mania; one, Jacques de Clerq, a merchant who traded with the Baltic and Brazil, was buying and selling tulips for as much as four hundred guilders a bulb as early as the winter of 1635. But many other members of the sect were highly critical of the tulip trade and urged those who dealt in bulbs to cease. Similarly, there were actually very few Jews in the United Provinces, and the only one known for certain to have been heavily involved in the tulip trade—the renowned Portuguese grower Francisco da Costa—appears to have been a man of unblemished reputation. As for bankrupts, even if a few had managed to squirrel a little money away from their creditors, none of the records of the time suggest that a single one played any part in the mania.
Probably only a minority of florists believed in such conspiracy theories. But a number do appear to have suspected that individual dealers had forced prices up artificially in order to maximize their profits. Price fixing was popularly supposed to be accomplished by age-old means of fake auctions. These affairs were supposedly organized by cunning traders who opened the proceedings by “selling” bulbs for record prices to their own accomplices in order to stimulate excitement and persuade others to buy at inflated rates.
A number of florists laid the blame for the mania at the feet of the growers. Some were accused of stoking up interest in tulips by selling bulbs with a guarantee that they would buy them back next year for more than they had cost. Others, it was claimed, passed off worthless vodderij as valuable bulbs. A grower from Amsterdam who was suspected of this sort of fraud is said to have tampered with the bulbs he sold, running them through with needles so as to damage them so badly they would not flower and reveal his deception. The man was eventually caught when one disgruntled purchaser made a close inspection of his tulips and discovered tiny puncture marks on the surface of the bulb.
It is perfectly possible that methods of this sort were indeed practiced upon occasion, but surely not so cynically and so regularly as to have a significant effect on bulb prices. In truth there was no need to concoct elaborate conspiracy theories to account for the excesses of the bulb craze. The greed, inexperience, and shortsightedness of the florists themselves were all that was required to turn tulip trading into tulip mania.
It was the last week of April before the Court of Holland finally concluded its review of the tulip mania. Eight weeks had passed since the growers had met at Amsterdam to propose their own solution to the crisis, three months since the collapse of the flower trade throughout the province. Yet when the learned judges of the Court returned their findings to the States, they began by admitting that they still did not fully understand what