Tulipomania Read online

  Those who wished to initiate a sale employed a slightly different system known as in het ootje, “in the little o.” Today this phrase is a piece of Dutch slang that means “to pull someone’s leg,” but during the tulip mania it referred to a portion of the rough diagram that the secretary of the college would draw to keep track of the bidding in what was effectively a form of auction. The diagram looked like this:

  When selling in het ootje, this same figure was sketched on the slates of each member of the college. A florist who wished to dispose of some bulbs would write in the small o at the bottom of the diagram the number of stuivers he was prepared to donate as a bounty or commission to a buyer. The amount would vary depending on the seller’s assessment of the value of his bulbs, but again it would be somewhere between two and six stuivers—that is, about the cost of a round or two of drinks. Prospective florists among the college would then offer what they thought the tulips were worth, the secretary keeping track of the bids by noting down the highest offer in thousands in the top semicircle, in hundreds in the bottom one, and in units underneath the vertical line. When the bidding was at an end, the secretary would strike three lines through the diagram on his board and surround the whole thing with a big O—the tulip trade’s equivalent, it would appear, of the modern auctioneer’s cry of “Going, going, gone.” This concluded the auction, and the seller had the option of accepting or rejecting the highest bid; but if he refused it, he still had to give the thwarted buyer the commission specified in het ootje. This method of trading bulbs, then, also placed a premium on accepting rather than rejecting a decent bid.

  So far so good, and it is clear that the tavern clubs facilitated the tulip trade by providing a meeting place for like-minded florists, offering them warm and comfortable surroundings and ensuring that their business was conducted in a haze of alcoholic enthusiasm. If they had done no more than that, the colleges would probably have ensured that bulb prices rose sharply, and a mania of some sort would have ensued. In fact, the customs of the tavern trade had an even greater impact.

  First, as we have seen, the colleges proved willing to trade not just real, physical tulips but also the rights to ownership of bulbs that were still in the ground. Thus they changed the tulip trade from a seasonal thing, possible only for a few summer months after the bulbs had been lifted, to a business that could continue all the year round. This gave the traders—who, it must be remembered, rarely had gardens of their own to tend—something to do during the winter, maximized their potential for profit, and also ensured that the wijnkoopsgeld continued to flow to everyone’s satisfaction. Second, the colleges failed utterly to check whether their members had enough money to cover their debts or even owned the tulips they traded. In the absence of physically real bulbs, this would seem to be an elementary precaution, but they did not take it. The tavern clubs thus encouraged unbridled speculation, while offering their members absolutely no safeguards against insolvency and fraud. It was now quite possible for a florist who owned no bulbs to trade, in the expectation that he would be able to shift his obligation to actually buy a given bulb onto another dealer long before he was called to account, then use the profit on that deal to fund his next purchase. And it was equally possible for the same man to become technically insolvent the moment the price of tulips fell.

  In the Samenspraecken Gaergoedt boasts of earning sixty thousand guilders from the flower trade in only four months. In the winter of 1636–37, the real tulip maniacs were to get a chance to see if they could match him.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Orphans of Wouter Winkel

  Tulip mania had made Wouter Bartelmiesz. Winkel one of the richest men in the town of Alkmaar. Although a mere tavern keeper by trade (he was the landlord of an inn called the Oude Schutters-Doelen in the center of the town), he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of fellow citizens who were wealthier than he. The only problem, which he shared with every other tulip dealer, was that he could not lay his hands on his money. It lay buried in the ground in the form of bulbs.

  Wouter Bartelmiesz. seems to have come originally from the village of Winkel, which lies about ten miles to the north of Alkmaar in the farthest tip of the province of Holland. His parents, while not wealthy, appear to have been reasonably well off. His brother Lauris was able to complete an apprenticeship and become a goldsmith—always one of the best-paid occupations to which a member of the artisan class could aspire—and when Wouter married Elisabet Harmans in 1621, he was able to promise his wife that they could afford a large family of their own. No fewer than seven of the children he had with Elisabet survived infancy, and because even in 1636 only one, fourteen-year-old Willem, was old enough to start earning his own living, the whole family must have been supported by the profits of the tavern and Winkel’s bulb trade.

  Alkmaar was one of the smaller towns of the United Provinces, but to a villager from Winkel it must have held all the allure of a metropolis. It was the market town for much of what was called the North Quarter of Holland, where it competed with its ancient rivals Hoorn and Enkhuizen for trade, and it was a notoriously independent place, uninterested in conforming to the fashions of the rest of the republic. The women of Alkmaar, for example, almost alone among the Dutch, did not wear white linen caps but fashioned their hair into an extraordinary style—all interwoven braids—that resembled a sort of helmet.

  The expanse of countryside that the town dominated had shrunk considerably since the Middle Ages, when it had effectively controlled most of North Holland and even several of the islands strung across the mouth of the Zuider Zee, but it was still surrounded by rich farmland and had benefited considerably from the recent draining of some of the small lakes to the south. The town specialized in beef and dairy produce and particularly in the huge wheel-shaped cheeses that had already made the United Provinces famous throughout Europe.

  The Winkel family seems to have prospered in Alkmaar for a while, but like every other family of the period, they lived lives that were permanently on the brink of tragedy. Even during its Golden Age the Dutch Republic remained prey to many of the dangers that made life in seventeenth-century Europe so frequently miserable. It was an era of war and want, short life expectancy, recurrent plague, and high infant mortality; the few doctors were still all but helpless in the face of even common illnesses, and the potions and cures they did prescribe were frequently deadlier than the illnesses they were supposed to counter. Few families could hope to go through life without losing a child or two, a husband, or a wife.

  In the Winkel family it was Elizabet Harmans who went first. She died sometime between 1631 and 1635, perhaps of disease, perhaps in childbirth, leaving her husband with three boys and four young girls to care for. There is no record of a second marriage, so the presumption is that Winkel struggled on very much alone, his older children helping to take care of their younger brothers and sisters, perhaps with the assistance of a servant or the serving girls at the Oude Schutters-Doelen.

  In those days Dutch children began their schooling at the age of seven, so the whole family except the youngest, a boy of six named Claes, were already of school age. That suggests that Wouter Winkel would not necessarily have had to hire anyone to help him with the children. Even so he would undoubtedly have felt the loss of his wife financially as well as emotionally. Someone would have to be paid to do the sewing, the cleaning, and the cooking that Elizabet had done, and so the profits of the tulip trade would have been even more important to the surviving members of the family now.

  Wouter Bartelmiesz. seems to have gotten involved in bulb dealing relatively early on. He was certainly buying and selling tulips in 1635, well over a year before the market really boomed, and the chances are that he started dealing in bulbs a year or two before that. This early start, combined with a little luck and a good understanding of the flower trade, enabled him to amass a tulip collection of quite spectacular quality.

  By the spring of 1636 the tavern keeper owned more tha
n seventy fine or superbly fine tulips, representing about forty different varieties, together with a substantial quantity of pound goods totaling about thirty thousand aces of lower-value bulbs. His tulips included some of the most valuable flowers to be found anywhere in the United Provinces: a very rare Violetten called Admirael van Enkhuizen, together with two Viceroys and five Brabansons of various types; three bulbs of the celebrated Rosen Admirael van der Eijck, an Admirael Liefkens, a Bruyn Purper (“Brown and Purple”), a Paragon Schilder, and no fewer than seven examples of the increasingly sought-after Gouda. At the height of the mania bulbs of every one of these varieties could easily change hands for a thousand guilders and often substantially more. Assembling such a quantity of the most sought-after tulips in the United Provinces was an astonishing feat of dealing on Winkel’s part. If his tulips were not the most fabulous collection of flowers in the republic, they must have come close, for no other record has yet been found of a bulb trader whose tulips even approached the quality and variety of those owned by Wouter Bartelmiesz.

  The most impressive thing about Winkel’s collection, though, was neither the variety nor the magnificence of the tulips in it, but the fact that he actually owned every flower in his inventory. Wouter might have been a tulip trader, but he was neither a connoisseur nor a florist; he was a grower. That meant his assets were more substantial than those of the majority of dealers, who owned nothing but promissory notes inscribed with a price and a notional delivery date and had no guarantee that their tulips were of good quality or even that they actually existed. Winkel’s assets were bulbs, planted in a garden close to his inn.

  Unfortunately for Wouter Winkel and his seven children, he did not live long enough to reap the enormous profits that his canny trading would have earned him. He saw his tulips flower in the spring of 1636, but he died sometime in the early summer, probably aged only in his late thirties or early forties. We do not know what accident or illness killed him, only that shortly afterward a party of grim-faced representatives of the local orphans’ court arrived at the Oude Schutters-Doelen and took the tavern keeper’s children off to Alkmaar’s orphanage.

  In some respects the children’s plight was not quite as catastrophic as it appeared. The death of both parents was a relatively common occurrence in the seventeenth century, and the United Provinces probably made better provision for caring for its orphans than any other country at that time. Most places of any size had their own orphanage, funded by the town and governed by a board of regents, who assumed responsibility for the children’s interests, supervised the full-time staff, and made sure sufficient funds were raised to keep the institution running smoothly. The same cities typically also ran homes for the elderly—one for men and another for women—which were open to any aged citizens who met certain residency requirements. These early social services, as we would call them today, were unique to the Dutch and were the envy of the foreigners who saw them.

  Nevertheless, the orphans of Wouter Winkel faced an uncertain future if they stayed in the Alkmaar orphanage. Their guardians, their uncles Lauris Bartelmiesz. and Philip de Klerck, would no doubt do what they could to help them, and the town would feed and clothe and school them for a year or two. But they were assured of board and lodging at the orphanage only until they were old enough to work for their living. Then it was very much expected that they would be packed off to some factory, mill, or workshop to learn a useful trade that would ensure they did not remain a burden on their hometown. The children would have very little choice as to where they were sent, and though they might then be no worse off than the children of other artisans, they had only one chance of assuring themselves a more comfortable life: They had to sell their father’s flowers.

  Their first step was to ensure that the tulips were safe. This was a very necessary precaution. As prices spiraled ever upward, every grower feared the loss of his bulbs, and some were already taking elaborate precautions to guard them. Some slept with their tulips, and one man, from the village of Blokker, installed trip wires around his bulbs and connected them to a bell that hung close to his bed. Confined to their orphanage and with their father dead, the Winkel children’s bulbs would have been especially at risk, and they must have greeted lifting time with some relief. Within a day or two all the tulips had been safely gathered and locked in a secure room in the orphanage while the trustees of the orphans’ court considered how best to proceed.

  That was in July 1636. It was not until December, however, with the bulbs carefully graded and weighed and back in the ground once more under the watchful eye of a gardener named Pieter Willemsz., that the trustees finally authorized a sale.

  It is not clear whether this long delay was caused by the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the orphans’ court or whether one of the regents of the orphanage had watched the rise in tulip prices and waited for the right moment to sell the Winkel bulbs. But whether it was by accident or design, it can hardly be doubted that the auction that finally took place at the Nieuwe Schutters-Doelen, Alkmaar, on February 5, 1637, was held at the perfect moment. In the months since Wouter Winkel’s death, tulip prices had doubled, then doubled and doubled again. With so many new buyers in the market, his rarest and finest bulbs were now far more sought after than ever before. And as chance would have it, the auction took place at precisely the moment that prices peaked.

  The trustees of the orphans’ court had taken care to publicize the sale, and the innkeepers of Alkmaar must have done good business as dozens of wealthy florists and growers crowded into the town in the first few days of February. Potential bidders were invited to inspect a special tulip book commissioned by the court that contained 124 watercolors of Winkel’s tulips and forty-four of the lilies, anemones, and carnations that made up the balance of his collection. The book acted as a sort of sale catalog and a reminder to potential buyers of the glories that could be theirs in only a month or two if they bid successfully.

  The auction at Alkmaar was the supreme moment of the tulip mania. The crowd attracted to the sale seems to have been a cut or two above the general hoi polloi of the taverns, and almost certainly the bidders would not have been permitted to get away with college practices such as offering part payment in kind. This was an auction for connoisseurs and affluent dealers. Real bulbs were being sold on a large scale for cash.

  Even before the proceedings began, one determined buyer had contrived to negotiate privately with the regents of the orphanage for the jewel of Winkel’s collection, the Violetten Admirael van Enkhuizen. When this tulip had been lifted the previous summer, the mother bulb was found to have grown a small offset, which promised to become a viable bulb itself in the new year. The presence of this offset substantially increased the value of the already rare bulb, and the regents sold it for an astonishing 5,200 guilders, close to the price that had been quoted for a Semper Augustus in 1636. The same wealthy buyer also purchased two of the increasingly popular lilac-flamed Brabansons for 3,200 guilders the pair, and a miscellaneous lot that appears to have consisted of some more rare tulips and Winkel’s collection of lilies, carnations, and anemones. For these flowers the buyer paid an additional 12,467 guilders—a staggering total, for this one sale alone, of more than 21,000 guilders, enough to buy not one but two large houses on the Kaisersgracht in Amsterdam.

  The lucrative private sale of these few bulbs set the tone for the auction that now began. The buyers appear to have been convinced, either by the tulip book or by Winkel’s reputation, that the flowers were of the highest quality and that this was a rare opportunity to acquire some of the most sought-after tulips in the United Provinces. They bid fiercely, and the prices achieved at Alkmaar were, with few exceptions, the highest ever recorded for the various tulips on sale.

  Most of the best lots were concentrated at the beginning of the auction. The first, a 563-ace bulb of a middle-ranking variety called Boterman, sold for 263 guilders, about half a guilder per ace, but the next, a tiny Scipio of only 82 aces, was knocked down for
400 guilders—five guilders an ace. A Paragon van Delft sold for 605 guilders, then Winkel’s prized Bruyn Purper, a subtle flower that mixed a hint of brown into its lilac flares, went for 2,025, which was six guilders seven stuivers per ace.

  So it went on, bulb after bulb attaining record prices. Only two of the seventy main lots that went under the hammer in the first part of the auction sold for less than a hundred guilders, and nineteen tulips were valued at more than a thousand guilders each. The most expensive bulbs were two good-sized Viceroys of 658 and 410 aces, which sold for 4,203 and 3,000 guilders respectively, but in terms of value per ace the most coveted flower was a Rosen of the variety Admirael Liefkens. This bulb, when planted, weighed a mere 59 aces, which made it the lightest tulip (bar one) to be sold that day. It can have been little more than an offset, but it cost its buyer 1,015 guilders, which is seventeen guilders four stuivers per ace.

  Even the cheaper piece goods that were sold at the end of the day—after all the superbly fine tulips had found buyers—attained good prices. Five hundred aces of Violetten Rotgans were sold for 805 guilders and for 725 to another, and a thousand aces’ worth of bulbs produced by Jan Casteleijn, a Haarlem grower who had a garden on the south side of the Campeslaen, was knocked down for a thousand guilders.

  Even before the auction had finally drawn to an end, it must have been obvious to those watching the bidding that Wouter Winkel’s bulbs were going for sums that were staggering even by the standards of the tulip mania. In addition to the 21,467 guilders raised in the earlier private sale, the seventy individual tulips auctioned at the Nieuwe Schutters-Doelen were sold for a combined total of 52,923 guilders and bulbs of the twenty-two varieties sold by the thousand aces went for a further 15,610. The total for the whole auction and the private sale combined came to a round 90,000 guilders.