You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [16]
At least one of Clusius’s neighbors figured a way around the old scientist’s reluctance to part with his precious plants. He stole the bulbs right out of his garden.
Soon thereafter, tulips began sprouting in the gardens of many of the Dutch merchant class, men newly made rich by the lucrative East Indies trade and not shy about displaying their wealth. The number of the cultivated varieties of these lovely blooms increased quickly in the hands of their Dutch growers, producing thirteen new groups of tulips with names like Couleren, Bizarden, Violetten, Marquertrinen, and Rosen, each of which could have produced literally hundreds of varieties, all based on their color schemes. The flowers were explosions of brilliant hues, solid and striped, some with gilded edges, some veined with startling flames and flares of contrasting colors. Purples and reds and yellows and pinks, purples and browns, colors more intense than anything else in the gardens of Holland. The tulip soon became the rage; indeed, possessing a collection of these lovely blooms was seen as evidence of taste and breeding among the rich. Wanting to also be viewed as tasteful and well bred, the middle class soon joined in the mania and, throughout the early part of the century, the price of tulip bulbs rose at a steady pace.
The first superstar of the tulip world was the celebrated Semper Augustus, a flower of the Rosen group of such breathtakingly intense reds and vivid blues and whites that it was universally hailed as the finest tulip ever grown. Again, its owner’s name was lost — or withheld — by history, but by 1624, all the estimated one dozen examples of this rare flower were in the hands of this single man. Offers were made to buy bulbs of this rare bit of beauty, but the man spurned them all in favor of keeping the majestic bloom to himself. It was reported that offers as high as two to three thousand guilders (one guilder was the approximate daily wage for a Dutch craftsman) were put on the table for a single Semper Augustus bulb. The inability to lay their hands on this most precious of the precious flowers drove the rest of the Dutch connoisseurs mad with envy, and they tried to retaliate by pushing the best specimens of their own collections to rival in both beauty and value the Semper Augustus. None ever succeeded. But this desire to own what they couldn’t have caused competition between collectors to grow and, more important, prices to push upward at a faster pace than before.
In his 1841 study of the crowd mentality, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay wrote, “In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention was caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” While Mackay was writing about the behavior of people in general, that description perfectly fits the Dutch of 1636–1637. The craze to own tulips and, more important, to sell them for huge sums of money or goods suddenly jumped from the upper classes to spread like head lice through every level of Dutch society. It became an all-consuming mania. Anyone with a few stuivers to rub together was jumping on the tulip bandwagon, with an informal network of futures markets setting up in hundreds of taverns across Holland.
By the winter of 1636–1637, the Netherlands was at the height of the tulip frenzy. Bulbs could be bought and sold a dozen times in a day — all while lying dormant in someone’s home or garden. Since tulips bloom only for a few days a year, these people weren’t even buying pretty, vibrant flowers; they were laying their life savings on a bulb that strongly resembled an onion (indeed,