THE GIANT KILLER Part One

I find it odd that such a minor player as the Methodist minister, the Reverend Henry Benjamin Turk is always the villein of the Cardiff Giant story. His pompous ignorance is what motivates and justifies the heroic sins of George Hull. But in Christian theology, ignorance is not one of the seven deadly sins. Greed, yes, lies, yes, lust and envy, surely, gluttony, and wrath: these are all the forgiven the sins of George Hull. Meanwhile, a fervent evangelical blind faith in a dyslexic translation was the Reverend Turk's chosen path to divinity And for obtusely following that path ad nauseam, the Reverend generally gets all the blame. Now, why do you suppose that is?

George Hull came close to being a giant himself. At six feet three inches tall, he towered half a foot above the average man of his day, and intimidated them with his broad muscular shoulders, and round face behind a slick black mustache and beneath his black, slicked back hair. But other than his size and villainous appearance, what most people remembered were George's small sharp intelligent blue eyes always darting about. His chief delight, recalled the post master in the Wisconsin Dells town of Baraboo, was expounding on the advantages of infidelity and betting on everything from pool games to local elections. In August of 1867 the tobacco warehouse George had opened four months earlier, and which he had insured to the amount of $12,000, burned to the ground, under circumstances which the insurance company thought highly suspicious. Despite George's declarations of innocence and threats of legal action, he accepted a $1,000 settlement and moved on.

According to George, he moved on to the tiny hamlet of Ackley, Iowa, because his brother-in-law who lived there had taken a consignment of 10,000 cigars, and was having trouble moving them. This could not have been surprising since Ackley had barely 300 residents. Even if every man woman and child smoked a dozen cheap cigars a day, it is difficult to envision how they could ever smoke 10,000 cigars before hacking up a lung and dropping dead.

George Hull had gotten into the business through his uncle, the front half of the Hull and Grummand Company, which had recently opened a cigar factory at Water and Henry streets in Bimginham, New York, on the Pennsylvania border.  The young George needed work after a short stint in jail for selling marked cards, and the cut throat cigar business seemed a natural for him.

The 8,000 citizens of Bimingham had strict anti-union laws, encouraging  local sweat shops to employ unskilled workers at starvation wages - 40 cents for a day spent rolling stale tobacco scraps and assorted agricultural detritus, dust and rodent droppings into 100 cigars that sold from three to fives cents each. It inspired a business model long on salesmanship, and short on morality.

But it was while residing with his sister and brother-in-law that George Hull briefly crossed paths with the fulcrum of his giant morality tale. According to George, “At that time a Methodist revivalist was in Ackley, and prayed all over the settlement....One night he was at my sister’s house, and after supper we had a long discussion and a hot one.” Specifically, according to George, the hot discussion centered around a quote from the King James Biblical book of Genesis, chapter six, verse four, “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”.

Besides sounding like a “Christianized” version of ancient Greek theology, the King James edition of the bible which the Reverend Turk quoted, was an English translation of a compilation written in Latin, of stories originally composed in Aramaic and Greek And as any skilled translator will tell you, and any reader of a Google translation will confirm, conveying the meaning from one language to another is as much social art as lexicography. Translating a translation only increases the inevitable misunderstandings. And in this particular text, the scholars compromised on the word “giants”, when a more precise word was “Nephilim”. But that word requires an uncomfortable explanation.

The mysterious Nephilim are mentioned only twice in the bible, this once in Genesis, and once in Numbers, chapter 13, verses 32 and 33 . “And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'” But they also appear in the Book of Enoch, which is not part of the conical bible, but a conservative Judaic variation. The Nephilim were the products of male angles mating with human woman. This was far too close to the pagan religions Yawah was so critical of. Later Christian scholars chose to mention them only twice, hoping to avoid the theological torture required to explain them, by using the word “giants” instead. And it was on the foundation of this compromised pebble that the Reverend Turk built his temple of biblical literalism.

But to return to the theology of George Hull, “At midnight we went to bed, and I lay wide awake wondering why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a stone giant and passing it off as a petrified man.” But, of course, there is nothing in George Hull's past which would have give any reason to believe that is what George thought. As one recent biographer put it, “ "Once Hull had an idea, he had no qualms about breaking partnerships, or laws, to get what he wanted.” And George Hull's obsession was not logic, or heaven, but money.

Five years earlier, Mark Twain had written his first humorous article for the Virginia City, Nevada “Territorial Enterprise”, which began, “A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner...”  In Twain's story the locals want to bury the defunct stone man, but cannot separate him from the rock which has engulfed him. So, “Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.”

Twain (above) later explained his inspiration. “One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding...one or two glorified discoveries of this kind....and I felt called upon to destroy this growing...petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.” Except the joke did not kill the idea of a petrified man. Twain was “stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced.” Over the next year, Twain's joke was reprinted as fact in newspapers across America, and even England, where it was published in “The Lancet”, the premiere scientific medical journal of the day.

It seems unlikely that George Hull realized that Twain's story, if he ever read it, was intended as a joke. In the history we have of him, George Hull does not display a sense of humor about anything that does not entail some degree of humiliation for somebody other than George Hull.  In fact, a witness said George had considered “salting” an “Indian burial mound” outside of Barboo, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1867, before he ever met the Reverend Turk. 

 It did not even matter to Hull that there were no dead Indians in most of  the Wisconsin mounds. They were drummlins,  formed by moving rivers of ice more than 10,000 years earlier, proving again that the truth is more complex and fascinating than the theology of angels dancing on the head of a pin, or mating with human women.

I don't know if the native peoples got the idea for their burial mounds from the moraines, but I do know that George Hull did not get the idea for the Cardiff Giant from the maligned Reverend Turk. And we should stop blaming him for it

- 30 -

A WOMAN SCORNED

I don’t know if Solomon Porcius Sharp (above) could have been President. But a man who had the job, John Quincy Adams, described the Kentucky lawyer as, “The brainiest man that ever came over the Allegheny Mountains.” The 38 year old Sharp had already served two terms as a Congressman, four years as Attorney General for Kentucky, and was now starting his second term as a state legislator – so the boy was not lacking for ambition, brains or talent. He spent his last day on earth, Sunday, 5 November, 1825, conferring with political allies as he prepared for his election as Speaker of the Kentucky House. Every indication was that come Monday morning, he would easily be elected. It seemed possible his next stop would be the United States Senate, and then, possibly, the White House; except, an ex-girlfriend of his, had other plans. 

Her name was Anna Cook, and in her youth she had been a real Southern Belle from Bowling Green, the same region and culture that would produce Mary Todd, Abraham Lincoln's wife. Anna was educated, witty,  flirtatious, with a passion for men and for gambling and for gambling on men. But she was never described as a great beauty. And like all gamblers, the more Anna gambled the more she lost. Few men of "good families" (i.e. wealthy) wanted to be responsible for her gambling debts.  By 1825 she was a spinster approaching forty, and her rose had withered a bit.  A critic described her as short, with dark hair and eyes, a few missing teeth, stoop shouldered and  “in no way a handsome or desirable woman.” And yet inside Anna there still burned a passion, which had metamorphosed into a burning fierce hatred of her old boyfriend.  It is impossible to say with certainty why Anna Cook became obsessed on Solomon Sharp. the up and coming politician. But when Anna’s young suitor,  Jereboam Beauchamp, proposed to her, Anna had said yes on the single condition that Jereboam first promise to kill Solomon Sharp.

Some five years earlier  Anna had attempted to derail Sharp’s political career by publicly charging he had fathered her stillborn child.  But Sharp’s allies had responded quickly by claiming the dead child had been born with black skin, and thus could not be the child of a white politician.  In a slave state like Kentucky, in a bigoted nation such as America in 1820,  it was a truly vicious attack. And with no living male relatives to defend her honor and challenge Sharp to a duel,  Anna had no way to respond.  In fact, her reputation was left in tatters no matter which side was believed. Had Sharp fathered the child?  Yes, he could have. And then this becomes a tale of misogyny.  But was there ever a child? If not, this becomes a  very different story, of obsession and growing insanity.  And two hundred years later it is impossible to choose between the two with certainty.  But we are certain about what happened next. 

With the failure of her original revenge, Ann had withdrawn into isolation to her widowed mother’s plantation, where Mr. Beauchamp had sought her out, for reasons left unexplained. He had been a neighbor to her father's Bowling Green plantation, and had been a law student in Sharp’s office. And to hear him tell it, the hypocrisy of the vicious attack against Anna had awakened an almost religious hunger for justice in the twenty-two year old...or so he said.  To call their marriage an affair of the heart seems somehow to have missed the point.  And after their 1824 wedding, as soon as it was convenient, like a misshapen Romeo, Jereboam traveled to Frankfort, looking to fulfill his promise to his new bride.

Of course there might have been another explanation for the timing of Jereboam’s (above) expedition to Frankfort, besides convenience. The week before, on 25 October, 1825,  a warrant for Jereboam’s arrest had been issued by the sheriff in Bowling Green.  It seems a single young woman named Ruth Reed was suing Jereboam for child support.  So the gallant defender of Anna's chaste womanhood might well have been the dead-beat dad of an illegitimate child himself.  Do you get the feeling that the public morality of neither the times nor Mr. Beauchamp nor Ms. Cook, were quite what they claimed to be?  Sort of just like today, yes?

Frankfort was a wooden town of just 1,500 souls when Jereboam arrived in November of 1825. It had been established at a ford across the Kentucky River, and was named for Stephen Frank, an early settler. The village became the state capital because local boosters contributed $3,000 in gold to the state treasury, and property for public buildings. It was not a generous act, as the boosters got rich selling house lots in the new burg. But thanks to their investment, Frankfurt was, in 1825, and remains to this day, one of the smallest state capitals in the Union. There were in 1825, a few brick structures in town, but fire was constantly updating the architecture of all the wooden buildings. Earlier in 1825 Frankfort had burned down its sixth state capital building, and was currently renting a Methodist Church for that purpose. 

Directly across the street from this temporary cathedral of democracy was the rented abode of Solomon Sharp and his wife and children (above).

Jereboam waited in the shadows of the church until Sharp returned to his Madison street home, sometime after midnight on 6 November, 1825. Then, as the clock approached two in the morning, he knocked on a side door. When Sharp responded, Jereboam identified himself as “Covington.”  Having opened the door, Solomon said he did not know any one by that name. Jereboam then cut the conversation short by thrusting a dagger into Solomon’s neck, severing his aorta. Solomon Sharp was dead shortly after he hit the floor. Jereboam then fled into the night. The first political assignation in American had just been committed.

 There were, of course, elaborate conspiracy theories which sprang up around the assignation of Solomon Sharp, spurred on by the victim’s politics and the $4,000 reward offered.  But the police stuck to what they could prove, and four nights after the murder Jereboam was arrested.  They never even found the murder weapon. And although Sharp’s widow eventually identified Jereboam’s voice as the one she heard call out “Covington”,  she had initially identified it as the voice of another one of her husband’s many political opponents. But several witnesses testified that Jereboam had repeatedly threatened to kill Solomon, and after a 13 day long trial, the jury had no doubts. On 19 May, 1826, after just one hour of deliberations, they returned with a verdict of guilty.

In his jail cell Jereboam dropped all pretense of innocence and wrote out a lengthy confession (above), filled with all the drama and heroics he clearly wanted to believe. According to his diatribe, Solomon had repeatedly admitted his crime against Anna, and in the final moments of his life had begged for mercy.  Even if true (and considering his injuries, such a speech was physically not possible), how that justified the cold blooded murder of a father of small children (On his gravestone the word "father" had even been carved in stone),  Jereboam did not attempt to explain.  And in the end it did not matter, because, as one commentator has pointed out,  it was at this point that the entire affair “went from tragedy to romantic melodrama.”

While awaiting the execution, Anna was being allowed to share her husband’s cell each night, coming and going during the day.  Into this place of confinement she slipped in a bottle of laudanum, a potent mixture of 89% grain ethanol, 10% opium and 1% morphine. The lovers intended a joint suicide, but instead produced only a double regurgitation marathon.  The absurdity of that sickening episode was matched only by the ineptitude of the jailers, because, just two days later these pin-headed penitenciariests allowed Anna to carry a knife into the cell for another unregulated visit.  Jereboam stabbed himself in the abdomen. Anna then grabbed the knife and stabbed herself in the stomach. If it was a race, she won. She died an hour later. Jereboam lived long enough that the jailers had to manhandle the wounded thespian up the thirteen steps of the scaffold, where he died, two hours after his wife.

They were buried together in the same grave, under a lengthy poem, composed by Jereboam, filled with noble words and maudlin sentiment. So the real cost of Anna Cook’s revenge was three lives; her own and the lives of two men she professed, at various times, to have loved. And I suspect she thought that was a fair trade. And that is the real tragedy in this so called "Kentucky  Tragedy".

- 30 -

"EQUO NE CREDITE " ( DO NOT TRUST THE HORSE)

I want to retell a story you've heard since childhood, a romance of brave heroes and young love crushed by cruel fate. It is the legend of the shining city of Troy, Helen and Achilles and the wooden horse. But this time I mean to wring as much of the myth out of the tale as I can. My version begins with the capricious, hot, dry Etesian winds, which for five months every summer for the last five thousand years have roared without warning down the winding narrow straights of the Hellespont – the Sea of Hellen - for days at a time. Faced with such a fickle and relentless foe, crews of the square rigged ships sailing from the Aegean Sea to the Bosporus and the Pontos Axinos (the Dark or Black Sea) beyond, risked their lives if caught in the straits by an Etesian wind.

A safe harbor close to the southern entrance of the dangerous straits, where a ship could safely wait for favorable winds, would surely prosper, and growing wealthy, would become a temptation. For some 1,500 years there was just such a wealthy port on a broad bay at the mouth of the Scamander river, within ten miles of gates to the Dardinelles. And to modern ears the cities' name sounds almost ethereal, as if whispered by the Etesian winds themselves – Wilusa.

Wilusa began as a fishing village, atop a 100 foot high limestone outcrop that jutted into the bay like a ship's prow. Over a thousand years the village became a royal palace and keep, five city blocks wide, with 25 foot high sloping walls. Eventually, as the town prospered, two ditches were dug, eleven feet wide and six feet deep, running out from the land side of the citadel, encircling a city of 6,000 people. A tunnel dug through the bed rock fed Wilusa with fresh water. And outside the walls, dotted with farms, was “The Troad”, the sea of grasses that made Wilusa famous for horse breeding.

The great crises for the city that would come to be called Troy began in the year 1275 B.C.E., when the guarantor of Wilusan royalty, The Hittite King Mursili III, was challenged by the resurgent Egyptians along his Syrian border. Seeking to secure his opposite flank, Mursili III picked the dull but stable, younger son Piya Walmu, for the kingship of Wilusa. And the new King payed the Hittites back by supplying horses and chariots for the Hittite Army under Mursili's uncle, Prince Hattusili. It was the logical decision, but it left out of power the older, ego maniacal son, Piya Aaradu,   meaning “gift of the faithful”. And his gift was a dangerous ambition.

The Battle of Kadesh in 1274 B.C.E. began when Hattusli's chariots caught a third of the Egyptian army by surprise, and came very close to sweeping it off the field and killing the Pharaoh. But Ramses kept his nerve and held his force together until reinforcements arrived. Nearly 4,000 chariots on both sides, the high tech weapon of the day, swept back and forth across the Syrian plain, until the Hittites were forced to take refuge behind the walls of Kadesh.  Hattusli was saved only because Ramses' army was too weakened to put the city under siege. Both sides' propaganda claimed a bloody victory, and both Ramses and Hattusli were labeled as heroes. But afterward both Hittite and Egyptian empires retreated to lick their wounds.

At the first word of Hittite troubles, Piya Aaradu staged a coup, murdered his bother and declared himself the new King of Wilusa. He immediately offered to renew the cities' friendship treaty with the Hittites  But Mursili knew he would not remain King for long if he was thought to be weak. And he felt his uncle Hattusli, the “hero” of Kadesh, looming over his throne. So Mursili commanded Manapa-Tarhunda, the governor of the Seha River region , just south of Wilusa, to punish the usurper for the Hittites.  In about 1273 B.C.E., the Seha army marched on Wilusa.  But on the plains of The Troad, Piya Aaradu ambushed the punitive force, and Manapa-Tarhunda was defeated. Now, suddenly, the entire Hittite western border was looking vulnerable, as well.

Mursili had no choice. In 1272 B.C.E. he dispatched a larger, fully Hittite force under a general known to history only as Gassus. Using a horsehide covered battering ram suspended from a rolling frame (above), the Hittites quickly breached the city walls of Wilusa.  Gassus allowed his warriors to sack the city, but prevented them from burning the entire place to the ground.  Afterward, Wilusa was no longer trusted enough to have its own king, but a local was named the new governor - Alaksandu. The only mistake Gassus  made, and perhaps the reason we do not know his full name, was that he allowed Piya Aaradu to escape.

The pouting prince sailed 300 miles down the coast of Asia Minor to the port of Millawanda, or Miletus in language of its Archean founders, the kings of Mycenea,  100 miles west across the Aegean Sea, in what is today Greece.   Here, Piya Aaradu was sympathetically greeted by his son-in-law Atpa, who was the governor, and was the brother to Akagamunas, the king of Mycenae. 

With this familiar support, Piya Aaradu led a mercenary raid against Hittite merchants on the island of Lesbos. The joint Achean and Wilusian raid captured 700 skilled artisans, who were then sold into slavery.  It seems likely Piya Aaradu split the profits with his son-in-law, and that Akagamunas also “got a taste”, to borrow a Mafia term from the 20^th century A.D.  The “had been” and “would be” King of Wilusa, Piya Aaradu was now a pirate, with money to finance future raids

Unfortunately for Piya Aaradu, his military alliance with the Hellenistic King Akagamunas of Mycenae, was the final straw for the Hittites. About 1269 B.C.E. Mursili III was sent into exile by, his uncle, Hatusili.   The new king gathered an army and about 1267 B.C., marched on Miletus. 

Piya Aaradu tried talking his way out of the mess. He offered to swear allegiance to Hatusili if he was returned to power in Wilusa.  Hattusli responded by sending an envoy to Miletus with instructions to bring Piya Aaradu back as his prisoner. Instead the envoy returned with yet another message, this one demanding that Piya Aaradu be reinstated as King of Wilusa, and no promise of loyalty. Hatusili's answer was to march his army right up to the border with Miletus. Teetering on the brink of all out war between Mycenea and the Hittites, Hattusili demanded Akagamunas hand over Piya Aaradu for punishment.

Akagamunas was not eager to start a war. Pulling Hittite beards was fun, and Piya Aaradu's raids had even shown a small profit. But big wars have a tendency to wipe out small profits very quickly. So, as a show of respect, the Governor of Melitus, Atpa, invited Hatusili to visit Melitus , assuring him he would over Piya Aaradu to him. But, once Hatusili was inside the city walls, Atpa informed the Hittite King that Piya Aaradu could not be found anywhere in Melitus. He had skipped town.

Hattusili was not happy. The switch with Piya Aaradu was an obvious insult. But he did not want a war, either. So after stomping around Mellitus for a few days, he headed home. And given the time and distance to think during his journey, and perhaps listen to his advisers, Hattusila decided to try a new approach. The following year he offered to give Piya Aaradu everything he wanted, including the crown of Wiliusa. Swear fidelity to Hattusili and all would be forgiven.

Now, no one in their right mind would have believed such an offer was genuine. But was Piya Aaradu in his right mind? And more importantly, could Akagamunas trust the pirate prince would stay in his right mind? It was one thing to finance Piya Aaradu when the Achaens had plausible denial  It would another if Piya Aaradu could trumpet proof of Mycenaean duplicity from the topless towers of Ilium. No matter how unlikely the offer from Hattusili was, it was a death sentence for Piya Aaradu.

Akagamunas could never give him the chance to tell the truth. It made no difference if the ego maniac was strangled in his bed, or stabbed by a trusted friend while leading another raid. His dead body may have even been handed over to Hattusili as a sign of good will. But it had to happen.

In fact Hattusili followed a similar strategy when his nephew Mursili escaped his exile and arrived in Egypt. First the Hittite King demanded his return. And then offered to welcome him back into the family. Both Mursili and Piya Aaradu simply, suddenly disappeared from history. And they were far from the only ones who disappeared. .

Beginning abound 1206 B.C.E., according to historian Robert Drews, “Within a period of forty to fifty years...almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again”  One of the first to be burned for the last time around 1200 B.C.E., seems to have been Wilusa. Almost the last to go was the Hittite capital of Hattusa, which was burned to the ground one night in 1180 B.C.E.  By then, every major city, from Greece to the Egyptian frontier, was violently destroyed, and often left unoccupied for generations.

Maybe the villeins were  invaders, or diseases, or volcanoes or climate change or perhaps even the replacement with bronze by iron tools and weapons. But whoever or whatever the cause, to a child growing up in Greece a thousand years before the current era, the past was a time of greatness and plenty, unlike their hungry today.  And leaders like Piya Aaradu (aka Priam), Akagamunas (or Agamemnon), Alaksandu (Alexander, aka Paris) were so famous for so long, they became myths. And Helen herself, the most beautiful woman in history, the face that launched a thousand ships and toppled the topless towers of Ilium (Troy) was Greece herself, and the new Hellenistic culture she would export to the entire world.

- 30 -

VIRUS

I want to talk about the human propensity for greed, by first discussing a small family of viruses which ignore humans completely -  the Potyviridae. These five related parasites, 100^th the size of a bacteria, do not infect humans, but they do infect and quickly kill lilies – after all,  the word virus is Latin for poison. In response, lilies evolved the tulip,  resistant enough to the Potyviridae that they could reproduce for perhaps a dozen generations before succumbing to these miniature succubus. And that's when humans come into the picture, because long before humans knew there was such thing as a virus, they found a way to ruin their own lives, and the lives of thousands of their fellows, by using Potyviridae.

See, tulips evolved from lilies where Europe blends into Asia, in the Ferghana Basin, north of Afghanistan, east of the Caspian Sea and west of Lake Balkhash. The basin is surrounded by mountains, and in this isolated test tube 36 different varieties of wild tulips developed over a few thousand years. Some had multiple stalks and blooms, some only one. The blooms could be white, red, yellow or orange. And when infected with Potyviridae the blooms would be wildly stained as if a child had asymmetrically dripped paint over them. Then, the unexpected happened. In the 8^th century, humans living in the Ferghana Basin converted to Islam, and tulip seeds and bulbs were transported westward to Islamic centers, as a beautiful curiosity, the more so because of the fanciful patterns they displayed when infected by Potyviridea, which traveled with its host. And because the bulbs could be be transported thousands of miles, because they were purely ornamental, and because they had to be replaced every few years, to own and grow them became a display of extreme wealth, conspicuous consumption, restricted to the caliphs in Baghdad and later Istanbul.

A century after Christopher Columbus – in 1593 - tulip bulbs were first planted in the Netherlands, by the botanist Carolus Clusius. His wealthy patrons were for the first time in history, not blue-blood royalty but the local burgomasters of the the town of Leiden. Recently freed from paying protection money to Spanish royalty, these Dutch Protestant capitalists were interested in just two things, making money, and showing everybody how much money they were making. The “Nouveau riche” adopted all the accouterments of their noble predecessors, including fine clothes, large homes, fancy carriages, portraits, and within ten years, ownership of the exotic tulip, so named because its bloom resembled a Turkish turban. And it was now that human greed enters our story, when tulips pass from being a de rigueur symbol of wealth, to the means for measuring and achieving wealth.

The Lord, it seemed, had designed the tulip to make humans rich, and a few Calvinist ministers pointed this out. The plant blooms for only a week or two in the spring. And having proven its colors, after the leaves have died back, the bulb may be dug up, marketed and sold, before being returned to the soil for the winter. So the primary tulip market was set by the plant itself, every fall. The rest of the year traders would buy and sell future contracts on the bulbs in the ground, gambling on their future vitality, which, considering they variations of color patterns being determined by a virus that were slowly killing the plant, was never a sure thing. . The futures market in tulips began to drive the price of tulips upward, until, within twenty years of Clusius' experiment - in 1610 - the burgomasters felt required to make it illegal to sell tulip futures “short”, meaning to gamble that the price for bulbs in the ground would drop before spring.

A disaster in the tulip trade was predictable as far back as the summer of 1623, when a bulb of the rarest variety (only 10 existed), Semper Augusttus, was sold for a thousand guilders. The most skilled carpenters earned only 250 guilders a year, and Carolus Clusius, the man responsible for all of this, earned a mere 750 guilders a year. But when the bulb of the Semper Augusttus (above)  was pulled from the ground, it was found to have two “daughter” bulbs, meaning the value of each Semper Augusttus bulb had just been reduced by 15%. The buyer was the fabulously rich Adriaan Pauw, and he was not happy, even though he now owned all 12 of the rare tulip.

The law against selling tulips short had been reaffirmed in 1621, and again in 1630, and yet again in 1636. Now you don't make a law unless you have to, and you don't keep making that law unless  short selling was going on. And many burgomasters saw the practise of betting on a catastrophe as dangerous. At the same time it seems safe to assume there was resistance to enforcing such laws, since no penalties were ever attached to a violation. It reminds me of the current toothless regulation of the banking industry in America. The general feeling seems to have been (and is in America today) that everybody could continue making money as long as everybody stayed greedy but smart. And that has never happened in all of human history, and it did not happen in the Netherlands in the 17^th century, first because the traders were not trading in what they thought they were trading in - tulips -  but in a virus which infected tulips, and second I remind you again of a central theme in many of my essays; greed makes you stupid.

Adriaan Pauw was smart. He was rich enough he did not need to be greedy with his tulips. He kept the value of his Semper Augusttus high by the simple expedient of not selling his bulbs, which prevented anybody from noticing that they got weaker with each generation. But he did go to the expense of constructing a gazebo in his garden, covered in mirrors, to reflect his blooms during their brief existence. It also more than doubled the impression of his wealth. In 1624 Pauw's Augusttus were valued at 1,200 guilders each, then 2,000, and in 1626 at 3,000 guilders for a single bulb. By 1633 each bulb of Augusttus, which had continued to produce “daughters”, was valued at 5,500 guilders. And finally Pauw could resist temptation no more. He only sold one at that price, and with the stipulation that it could be re- sold only with his approval.  But inflation had spread like a virus to all varieties of tulips. During one two year period the price for “General of Generals” bulbs increased from 100 guilders to 750 guilders. On February 5, 1637 at an auction held in the lake side fortress village of Alkmarr, an Admiral van Enkhuizen bulb, was sold for 5, 200 guilders, several million American dollars today. Who could resist such temptation?

That single auction, saw 70 rare bulbs sold for 53,000 guilders, an all time high. But just two days earlier and 20 miles to the south in the village of Harrlem a tulip investor and grower club – called a college – had become so worried about these rising prices that they decided to test the market. They held an auction of a huge quantity of common bulbs. They meant to see how deep the demand really was. The experiment blew up in their faces. Only one buyer showed up. Realizing he was the market, he demanded a 35 % discount. And he got it. And when word of this disaster reached Alkmarr and beyond, a stunned silence settled over tulip colleges all over the Netherlands. Prices of tulips collapsed like the price of baseball trading cards or comic books after  2007. Many varieties of tulips would quickly lose 95% of their value.

Families went bankrupt -  how many has become a subject for much debate in economic circles. But many victims sought a new start in the New World. Said one Calvinist, it was “ God’s Just Plague-Punishment, for the attention of the well-to-do Netherlanders in this bold, rotten Century.”  It was the usual, "Heads, God wins; tails human lose" philosophy. There were lawsuits, and everybody wanted out of their futures contracts. The government tried to help, but any new law saving buyers was opposed by sellers, and any new law favoring sellers was opposed by buyers. So the politicians did nothing.   The very wealthy Adriaan Pauw's fortune survived, although he did take a hit. And most futures contracts were quietly closed out for 10-15% of their paper value.

A lot of people have tried to claim the Tulip Mania  was not a “market bubble”, like all the other market bubbles since. But the best description of what went wrong that I have found was by A Maurits van der Veen, from the College of William and Mary. (http://www.maurits.net/Research/TulipMania.pdf ) He wrote in 2009, “When novice traders entered the market...it became increasingly difficult to distinguish those with solid private knowledge from those who were simply following the crowd... these constituted a new kind of trade, no longer linked to individual bulbs.” In other words, greed driven investors were betting not on tulips, but tulip investors - call it tulip derevitives. And that had blown the market up. Sounds like a market bubble to me. And when Tulip mania died, so did some of the most valuable strains of tulips. There has not been a Semper Augusttus bloom seen since the middle of the 17^th century.

There are many who still insist the Semper Augusttus was the most beautiful tulip that ever existed, as there are many who insist an unregulated “free market” is superior to a regulated stock market. But with its asymmetrical and varied patterns the Semper Augusttus was actually the product of Potyviridae devouring the tulip from the inside, breaking its genetic code, and slowly killing its host. It was not a true species. It lived no longer than the rich man who had the fortune to maintain its artificial existence.  Modern tulips are far stronger,  their colors symmetrical, and more resistant than the frail infected flowers  that so entranced the “Nouveau riche” of 1637. And because of that, billions of people today enjoy tulips  And some day, perhaps, the nouveau rich of our age will come to admit that like the Potyviridea infected tulip, an unregulated  “free market”, which produced the tulip mania and a thousand other manias and bubbles in the 400 years since, is merely a splash of color which distracts your attention from the parasite devouring capitalism  right before your eyes.

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