Tulipomania - Mike Dash [97]
This steady business was of inestimable value to the florists, who certainly must have lost a good proportion of their customers to the mania, and from scattered hints it appears that the bulb growers did what they could to keep the supply of the most favored species low. They thus contrived to maintain prices at a decent level for years, cannily resisting the temptation to breed more tulips and risk flooding the limited market that remained.
Comparatively little data concerning the prices paid for tulips has survived for the years after 1637. Peter Mundy, who traveled through the United Provinces in 1640, noted that “incredible prices” were still being paid for what he called “tulip rootes,” without giving examples. But the sort of sums Mundy, a reasonably well-off merchant, would have considered incredible were still far short of those commanded in 1636 and 1637. An Admirael van der Eijck, which sold for an average of about 1,345 guilders per bulb at Alkmaar, went under the hammer for only 220 guilders when another grower’s estate was auctioned off in 1643, and a Rotgans once worth 805 guilders, for only 138. Without knowing the precise weights of the bulbs concerned, it is impossible to say for certain that the sums are truly comparable, but in both these cases prices had fallen to only a sixth of what they had been at the height of the mania—an average annual depreciation of 35 percent.
If the rarities fared badly, then—as might be expected—the cheaper bulbs did considerably worse. They had appreciated late, and only when the stock of more desirable bulbs seemed exhausted; they were too common and too drab to interest the connoisseurs. Witte Croonen—plain White Crowns—that had sold for 64 guilders per half-pound in January 1637 and then rose to the giddy heights of 1,668 guilders the half at Alkmaar, could be had for only 37½ guilders five years later. To reach that low, they had depreciated at a spectacular average of 76 percent per year.
Those sort of prices were not enough to sustain everyone who had dabbled in bulb growing. In the years that followed the mania, the fledgling flower industry contracted, and most of the new and inexperienced growers who had been attracted by the prospect of rich profits gave up the business or were driven out. Tulip breeding retreated quite literally to its roots in the rich sandy soils around Haarlem; indeed, the town now established a total dominance over the bulb trade such as it had never enjoyed when the times were good and everyone was growing tulips. During the reign of Ahmed III, the farms of Haarlem shipped tens of thousands of bulbs to the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The town became so closely associated with the finest flowers that the handful of florists who did base themselves away from the town routinely listed their address as “Near Haarlem” when they sent out catalogs and price lists. They knew their produce would be dismissed as second-rate if they did not.
The trade was much more rational now. The bulbs that did command high prices were taken to auctions, which continued to be held in Haarlem for the remainder of the seventeenth century. The tulips sold at these affairs would have been those of new varieties, recently developed and still rare enough to command a premium. After a few years most of these newcomers would lose their sheen, and the connoisseurs would move on to other novelties. In time the once-fashionable bulbs would become relatively commonplace, and the growers would begin to sell them to callers or via mail order through garden catalogs aimed at more modest purses. It would appear from surviving lists of the extensive bulb purchases made by one German tulipophile—Charles, margrave of Baden-Durlach—that by about 1712 the bulbs available from these catalogs cost only a guilder apiece on average, although a few varieties might command ten, twenty, or even forty guilders a bulb. The number of species and the