The Tulipomania
Alboni, the singer, had an exquisitely sweet voice, but was a very big
fat woman. Somebody accordingly remarked that she was an elephant that
had swallowed a nightingale. About as incongruous is the idea of a
nation of damp, foggy, fat, full-figured, broad-sterned, gin-drinking,
tobacco-smoking Dutchmen in Holland, going crazy over a flower. But they
did so, for three or four years together. Their craze is known in
his
ory as the Tulipomania, because it was a mania about tulips.
Just a word about the Dutchmen first.
These stout old fellows were not only hardy navigators, keen
discoverers, ingenious engineers, laborious workmen, able financiers,
shrewd and rich merchants, enthusiastic patriots and tremendous
fighters, but they were eminently distinguished (as they still are to a
considerable extent) by a love of elegant literature, poetry, painting,
music and other fine arts, including horticulture. It was a Fleming that
invented painting in oils. Before him, white of egg was used, or
gum-water, or some such imperfect material, for spreading the color.
Erasmus, one of the most learned, ready-minded, acute, graceful and
witty scholars that ever lived, was a Dutchman. All Holland and
Flanders, in days when they were richer, and stronger compared with the
rest of the world than they are now, were full of singing societies and
musical societies and poetry making societies. The universities of
Leyden and Utrecht and Louvain are of highly an ancient European fame.
And as for flowers, and bulbs in particular, Holland is a principal home
and market of them now, more than two hundred years after the time I am
going to tell of.
Tulips grow wild in Southern Russia, the Crimea and Asia Minor, as
potatoes do in Peru. The first tulip in Christian Europe was raised in
Augsburg, in the garden of a flower-loving lawyer, one Counsellor
Herwart, in the year 1559, thirteen years after Luther died. This tulip
bulb was sent to Herwart from Constantinople. For about eighty years
after this the flower continually increased in repute and became more
and more known and cultivated, until the fantastic eagerness of the
demand for fine ones and the great prices that they brought, resulted in
a real mania like that about the morus multicaulis, or the petroleum
mania of to-day, but much more intense. It began in the year 1635, and
went out with an explosion in the year 1837.
This tulip business is, I believe, the only speculative excitement in
history whose subject-matter did not even claim to have any real value.
Petroleum is worth some shillings a gallon for actual use for many
purposes. Stocks always claim to represent some real trade or business.
The morus multicaulis was to be as permanent a source of wealth as corn,
and was expected to produce the well known mercantile substance of silk.
But nobody ever pretended that tulips could be eaten, or manufactured,
or consumed in any way of practical usefulness. They have not one single
quality of the kind termed useful. They have nothing desirable except
the beauty of a peculiarly short-lived blossom. You can do absolutely
nothing with them except to look at them. A speculation in them is
exactly as reasonable as one in butterflies would be.
In the course of about one year, 1634-5, the tulip frenzy, after having
increased for fifteen or twenty years with considerable speed, came to a
climax, and poisoned the whole Dutch nation. Prices had at the end of
this short period risen from high to extravagant, and from extravagant
to insane. High and low, counts, burgomasters, merchants, shop-keepers,
servants, shoe-blacks, all were buying and selling tulips like mad. In
order to make the commodity of the day accessible to all, a new weight
was invented, called a perit, so small that there were about eight
thousand of them in one pound avoirdupois, and a single tulip root
weighing from half an ounce to an ounce, would contain from 200 to 400
of these perits. Thus, anybody unable to buy a whole tulip, could buy a
perit or two, and have what the lawyers call an "undivided interest" in
a root. This way of owning shows how utterly unreal was the pretended
value. For imagine a small owner attempting to take his own perits and
put them in his pocket. He would make a little hole in the tulip-root,
would probably kill it, and would certainly obtain a little bit of
utterly worthless pulp for himself, and no value at all. There was a
whole code of business regulations made to meet the peculiar needs of
the tulip business, besides, and in every town were to be found
"tulip-notaries," to conduct the legal part of the business, take
acknowledgments of deeds, note protests, &c.
To say that the tulips were worth their weight in gold would be a very
small story. It would not be a very great exaggeration to say that they
were worth their size in diamonds. The most valuable species of all was
named "Semper Augustus," and a bulb of it which weighed 200 perits, or
less than half an ounce avoirdupois, was thought cheap at 5,500 florins.
A florin may be called about 40 cents; so that the little brown root was
worth $2,200, or 220 gold eagles, which would weigh, by a rough
estimate, eight pounds four ounces, or 132 ounces avoirdupois. Thus this
half ounce Semper Augustus was worth--I mean he would bring--two hundred
and sixty-four times his weight in gold!
There were many cases where people invested whole fortunes equal to
$40,000 or $50,000 in collections of forty or fifty tulip roots. Once
there happened to be only two Semper Augustuses in all Holland, one in
Haarlem and one in Amsterdam. The Haarlem one was sold for twelve acres
of building lots, and the Amsterdam one for a sum equal to $1,840,00,
together with a new carriage, span of grey horses and double harness,
complete.
Here is the list of merchandise and estimated prices given for one root
of the Viceroy tulip. It is interesting as showing what real merchandise
was worth in those days by a cash standard, aside from its exhibition of
tremendous speculative bedlamism:
160 bushels wheat $179,20
320 bushels rye 223,20
Four fat oxen 192,00
Eight fat hogs 96,00
Twelve fat sheep 48,00
Two hogsheads wine 28,00
Four tuns beer 12,80
Two tuns butter 76,80
1000 lbs. cheese 48,00
A bed all complete 40,00
One suit clothes 32,00
A silver drinking cup 24,00
---------
Total exactly $1,000,00
In 1636, regular tulip exchanges were established in the nine Dutch
towns where the largest tulip business was done, and while the gambling
was at its intensest, the matter was managed exactly as stock gambling
is managed in Wall street to-day. You went out into "the street" without
owning a tulip or a perit of a tulip in the world, and met another
fellow with just as many tulips as yourself. You talk and "banter" with
him, and finally (we will suppose) you "sell short" ten Semper
Augustuses, "seller three," for $2,000 each, in all $20,000. This means
in ordinary English, that without having any tulips (i. e., short,) you
promise to deliver the ten roots as above in three days from date. Now
when the three days are up, if Semper Augustuses are worth in the market
only $1,500, you could, if this were a real transaction, buy ten of them
for $15,000, and deliver them to the other gambler for $20,000, thus
winning from him the difference of $5,000. But if the roots have risen
and are worth $2,500 each, then if the transactions were real you would
have to pay $25,000 for the ten roots and could only get $20,000 from
the other gambler, and he, turning round and selling them at the market
price, would win from you this difference of $5,000. But in fact the
transaction was not real, it was a stock gambling one; neither party
owned tulips or meant to, or expected the other to; and the whole was a
pure game of chance or skill, to see which should win and which should
lose that $5,000 at the end of three days. When the time came, the
affair was settled, still without any tulips, by the loser paying the
difference to the winner, exactly as one loses what the other wins at a
game of poker or faro. Of course if you can set afloat a smart lie after
making your bargain, such as will send prices up or down as your profit
requires, you make money by it, just as stock gamblers do every day in
New York, London, Paris, and other Christian commercial cities.
While this monstrous Dutch gambling fury lasted, money was plenty,
everybody felt rich and Holland was in a whiz of windy delight. After
about three years of fool's paradise, people began to reflect that the
shuttlecock could not be knocked about in the air forever, and that when
it came down somebody would be hurt. So first one and then another began
quietly to sell out and quit the game, without buying in again. This
cautious infection quickly spread like a pestilence, as it always does
in such cases, and became a perfect panic or fright. All at once, as it
were, rich people all over Holland found themselves with nothing in the
world except a pocket full or a garden-bed full of flower roots that
nobody would buy and that were not good to eat, and would not have made
more than one tureen of soup if they were.
Of course this state of things caused innumerable bankruptcies,
quarrels, and refusals to complete bargains, everywhere. The government
and the courts were appealed to, but with Dutch good sense they refused
to enforce gambling transactions, and though the cure was very severe
because very sudden, they preferred to let "the bottom drop out" of the
whole affair at once. So it did. Almost everybody was either ruined or
impoverished. The very few who had kept any or all of their gains by
selling out in season, remained so far rich. And the vast actual
business interests of Holland received a damaging check, from which it
took many years to recover.
There were some curious incidents in the course of the tulipomania. They
have been told before, but they are worth telling again, as the poet
says, "To point the moral or adorn the tale."
A sailor brought to a rich Dutch merchant news of the safe arrival of a
very valuable cargo from the Levant. The old hunks rewarded the mariner
for his good tidings with one red herring for breakfast. Now Ben Bolt
(if that was his name--perhaps as he was a Dutchman it was something
like Benje Boltje) was very fond of onions, and spying one on the
counter as he went out of the store, he slipped it into his pocket, and
strolling back to the wharf, sat down to an odoriferous breakfast of
onions and herring. He munched away without finding anything unusual in
the flavor, until just as he was through, down came Mr. Merchant,
tearing along like a madman at the head of an excited procession of
clerks, and flying upon the luckless son of Neptune, demanded what he
had carried off besides his herring?
"An onion that I found on the counter."
"Where is it? Give it back instantly!"
"Just ate it up with my herring, mynheer."
Wretched merchant! In a fury of useless grief he apprised the sailor
that his sacrilegious back teeth had demolished a Semper Augustus
valuable enough, explained the unhappy old fellow, to have feasted the
Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder's whole court. "Thieves!" he cried
out--"Seize the rascal!" So they did seize him, and he was actually
tried, condemned and imprisoned for some months, all of which however
did not bring back the tulip root. It is a question after all in my
mind, whether that sailor was really as green as he pretended, and
whether he did not know very well what he was taking. It would have been
just like a reckless seaman's trick to eat up the old miser's twelve
hundred dollar root, to teach him not to give such stingy gifts next
time.
An English traveller, very fond of botany, was one day in the
conservatory of a rich Dutchman, when he saw a strange bulb lying on a
shelf. With that extreme coolness and selfishness which too many
travellers have exercised, what does he do but take out his penknife
and carefully dissect it, peeling off the outer coats, and quartering
the innermost part, making all the time a great many wise observations
on the phenomena of the strange new root. In came the Dutchman all at
once, and seeing what was going on, he asked the Englishman, with rage
in his eyes, but with a low bow and that sort of restrained formal
civility which sometimes covers the most furious anger, if he knew what
he was about?
"Peeling a very curious onion," answered Mr. Traveller, as calmly as if
one had a perfect right to destroy other people's property to gratify
his own curiosity.
"One hundred thousand devils!" burst out the Dutchman, expressing the
extent of his anger by the number of evil spirits he invoked--"It is an
Admiral van der Eyck!"
"Indeed?" remarked the scientific traveller, "thank you. Are there a
good many of these admirals in your country?" and he drew forth his note
book to write down the little fact.
"Death and the devil!" swore the enraged Dutchman again--"come before
the Syndic and you shall find out all about it!" So he collared the
astounded onion-peeler, and despite all he could say, dragged him
straightway before the magistrate, where his scientific zeal suffered a
dreadful quencher in the shape of an affidavit that the "onion" was
worth four thousand florins--about $1600--and in the immediate judgment
of the Court, which "considered" that the prisoner be forthwith clapt
into jail until he should give security for the amount. He had to do so
accordingly, and doubtless all his life retained a distaste for
Dutchmen and Dutch onions.
These stories about such monstrous valuations of flower roots recall to
my mind another anecdote which I shall tell, not because it has anything
to do with tulips, but because it is about a Dutchman, and shows in
striking contrast an equally low valuation of human life. It is this.
Once, in time of peace, an English and a Dutch Admiral met at sea, each
in his flag ship, and for some reason or other exchanged complimentary
salutes. By accident, one of the Englishman's guns was shotted and
misdirected, and killed one of the Dutch crew. On hearing the fact the
Englishman at once manned a boat and went to apologize, to inquire about
the poor fellow's family and to send them some money, provide for the
funeral, etc., etc., as a kind hearted man would naturally do. But the
Dutch commander, on meeting him at the quarter-deck, and learning his
errand, at once put all his kindly intentions completely one side,
saying in imperfect English:
"It'sh no matter, it'sh no matter--dere's blaanty more Tutchmen in
Holland!"