AIR HEADS Part Two

I believe Bob Fowler was confident on 23 September, 1911,  when the repairs to his "Cole Flyer" were finally completed, and he finally took off from Colfax, California, (alt. 3,306 feet) in the Sierra foothills. He certainly looks confident in this photo. His confidence was, however, seriously misplaced. Immediately that he reached six thousand feet up the Sierra Nevada mountains, Bob hit headwinds that his 40 horsepower Cole motor just not overcome. He was forced to return to Colfax.

That same day (23 September) back east, the little jockey Jimmy Ward was following the “iron compass”, as pilots referred to following railroad lines.  In this case he was tracking the Erie Railroad westward out of Middletown, N.Y.   Jimmy landed safely at Callicoon, New York (above) and refueled,at 10:05 a.m., as planned. He refueled again at Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, and took off again at 2:15 P.M.

Two hours later, after avoiding crowds waiting for him at other landing fields, the shy James touched down on a farm outside of Owego, N.Y. Here the jockey hitched a ride into town, where he ate a quick dinner while a local mechanic refueled his plane. He wanted to make it to Corning, New.York. before dark. So he hurried his take off.  But as the jockey lifted into the air his engine coughed, his wheels snagged a fence and he was yanked to an abrupt halt. His lower left wing was bent, his wheels destroyed. Jimmy Ward was unhurt, physically, but it would take a crew from Curtiss Airplane almost two days to repair the damage.

 Back out in California, bright and early on 24 September, Bob Fowler tried again to get over the Sierra Nevada mountains. This time he got as high as as Emigrant Gap, just below the Donner Pass, 7,500 feet above sea level. But headwinds again forced him to retreat to Colfax.

On the 25 September,  Bob reached 8,000 feet before running into headwinds again. This time Bob decided to land at Emigrant Gap, in order to get a head start start the next day. But flying in the thin air at high altitude was a skill not yet mastered by anyone, including Bob, and while turning around his wings lost lift and he plowed into the trees. They had to send out a search party to locate him, and when they did he had two broken wings and and two broken propellers - I mean  his "Cole Flyer" did.  Bob himself was somehow uninjured, but for the time being his continental flight was… waiting for repairs, again.

Back in Owego, New York, the repaired Jimmy Ward’s Curitss airplane managed to limp into Corning and then on to the village of Addison, N.Y. (above) late on 25 September, 1911.  Jimmy was now 300 miles and 10 long days out of New York City.  But at this rate it could take him the better part of a year to reach California. Anxious to make up for lost time, at 7:18 A.M. on the 26 September, James took off from Addison.  And about five miles west of town he crashed again. He had to walk almost the whole way back to town. This was getting really hard.

Back at the hotel, waiting for her husband,  Jimmy‘s wife, Maude Mae, overheard some gamblers taking five-to-one odds that her husband would be dead before he reached Buffalo, New York.  Now, Maude May knew that Jimmy was not actually planning on heading to Buffalo, but she also knew that town was still 60 miles further to the west. And since,  at the rate Jimmy's flight was progressing,  he could have been out run by a Conestoga wagon and would not be near California by the middle of October. And at the rate Jimmy was crashing, Maude Mae figured the gamblers were being a bit optimistic at about her husband's lifespan.  So Maude Mae decided to be practical - leave it to a woman to destroy a daredevil sporting event with practical thinking. Maude Mae spoke to the shaken Jimmy that night. And after his long walk and his two crashes over the previous four days, Jimmy was inclined to listen.

Jimmy's manager announced his decision to the press the next morning. He was dropping out of the race. Later, Jimmy Ward would explain his decision in less than pragmatic terms. “It was a plain case of a jinx”, he said.  And then he went on to prognosticate. “Rodgers is a mighty fine fellow, " said Jimmy, "and I wish him all kinds of luck, but he won't reach the coast within the specified time.  To win that $50,000 he's got to complete his journey by Oct. 10th.  He can't do it.  He'll get through all right, but not by that date.” Given his skill at fortune telling,  I am surprised that Jimmy Ward had no inkling that just seven months later Maude Mae would have him arrested in Chattanooga and charged with bigamy. She had discovered that Jimmy was never legally divorced from his first wife.  Poor Maude Mae. Poor, Jimmy Ward. And  he may have been the pilot with the most brains. Without his brains, the race went on. 

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AIR HEADS Part One

I suppose it seemed like a good idea in the beginning. There were three serious contestants, and a $50,000 first place prize. But in retrospect, it should have been obvious that nobody was going to collect a dime of that money. It was 1911; flying was still brand new and the world’s first two pilots were still flying - Wilbur and Orville Wright - and still learning The world's third pilot was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and he had died on September 17, 1908, in a crash that also badly injured Orville. The second pilot to die was Charles Rolls (of Rolls-Royce fame), in a 1910 crash. Considering there were only about 100 men (and one woman) with flying licenses in America in 1911, two percent was an appalling death  rate, bad enough to make you wonder why anybody would have wanted to even try flying, let alone try it from coast to coast.

The world’s 49th licensed pilot was a shy, cocky, 6’4” thirty-something, cigar smoking, playboy and adrenaline junkie with a hearing loss and a speech impediment named Calbraith Perry Rogers (above -right). He was a romantic who favored action over words, as proven by the way he met his wife, 20 something Mabel Groves (above, left). He saw her slip off a dock and fall into the water. So assuming she was drowning, he jumped in and pulled her to safety. Within a few months he married her, despite the hat. He approached flying with the same spontaneity, but it quickly developed into a mission..

 Having seen his first airplane on a visit to Dayton, Ohio, in June of 1911, Cal took the full Wright Brother’s flight course (above),  all 90 minutes of it. Mabel explained that flying filled the hole in his life by his deafness which had excluded a military career. It was, she said "the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle". 

Then Cal talked his mother, Maria, into loaning him $5,000 so he could buy a Wright Model B Flyer “E-X”. The "X" was for experimental – which was a joke because every “airplane” was experimental in 1911. But Cal may also have been the origin of the phrase to “take a flyer”, because just two months later, in August, he entered his new Wright Flyer in an air show in Chicago and took home third prize, worth $11, 285.  Not bad: Cal had been a pilot for 60 days and already he had made six grand profit. He suspected there might be money in this flying thing.

And this was confirmed in October of 1910 when the Hearst newspaper chain had offered $50,000 to the first pilot to make it across the continent in 30 days or less. The offer was set to expire on 10 October. So with his self supplied confidence, Cal decided to go for it. Orville Wright tried to warn him. "There isn't a machine in existence that can be relied upon for 1,000 miles,  and here you want to go over 4,000. It will vibrate itself to death before you get to Chicago."  But Cal refused to give up the idea. He explained, "It's important because everything else I've done was unimportant."  Faced with that level of stubbornness, Orville tried to look at the bright side. At least the Wright B Flyer was so light, said Orville "six good men could carry it across the country."

 What Cal needed, as any NASCAR driver can tell you, was a sponsor. He found his ‘sticker sucker’ in  Mr. J. Odgen Armour, owner of Armour Meat Packing Company, and his new soft drink called “VIN FIZ”.  Allegedly it was grape favored soda water, but one critic thought it tasted more like  “a fine blend of river sludge and horse slop”  With a product like that Mr. Amour was going to need a heck of an advertising campaign. Enter Cal and his flying bill board.

With a guarantee of $23,000 from Amour, and a bonus of $5 per mile east of the Mississippi River, and $4 per mile to the west of the "big muddy", and a corporate three rail car support train complete with a reservoir of spare parts, fuel and mechanics, and sleeping car accommodations for Mable, Cal’s mother Maria,  his cousin, his head mechanic Charlie Taylor, two other mechanics, two general assistants and assorted reporters from the Hearst news service. Suddenly the flight looked possible..

Armour even threw in an automobile (above) to track down Cal whenever he crash landed . With that much corporate funding behind him, Cal figured he had it all figured out. The first problem was that, before Cal even got airborne, his "Vin Fiz" was already in third place.

First off, from Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was motorcycle racer Bob Fowler (above). There were 10,000 cheering people there at 1:35 P.M., on 11 September 1911 to see Bob takeoff.  Like Cal, Bob was piloting a Wright “B” Flyer, except his sponsor was Joseph J. Cole, founder and owner of the Cole Motor Company, of Indianapolis, Indiana. Cole supplied Bob with one of their engines and $7,500. The Cole engine was more powerful than the Wright engine, but it was also 200 lbs heavier. J.J. also gave Bob a support train, with spare parts and his own mother. But "The Cole Flyer" lacked the publicity support that accompanied the "Vin Fizz  Flyer..

Making an average speed of about 55 miles an hour, Bob reached Sacramento in just under 2 hours, and after schmoozing with California Governor Hiram Johnson, Bob flew on to the foothill town of Auburn, for a total distance on the first day of 126 miles. On 12 September he reached Alta, California, where he crashed into some trees. Bob was now out of the race until repairs could be made.

Second to start was James J. (Jimmy) Ward (above),  pilot's license #52, and previously a jockey. He was flying a Curtis Model D,  with floats. Jimmy took off from Governor’s Island in New York harbor on 13 September, 1911. He immediately got lost over New Jersey, and made only twenty miles before crash landing. Then he too had to wait for repairs. The basic tempo of the race had thus been set right from the start; take off, crash, wait for repairs, take off, crash, wait for repairs, and repeat as necessary for 3,000 miles. It was going to be very hard to finish this race, let alone win it.

Before starting himself, Cal Rogers tied a bottle Vin Fiz to one of his wing struts (white circle on the left), “for luck”. For reality, he tied a pair of crutches to another strut, in case he needed them later. He would.

Before a paying crowd of 2,000, a chorus girl poured a bottle of grape soda over the landing skids and proclaimed, “I dub thee “Vin Fiz Flyer””. Cal actually called his plane “Betsy” but he recognized the value of naming fees even back then.

Cal took off from the race course at Sheepshead Bay, Long Island at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, 17 September. And if anybody noticed that it was the third anniversary of the crash that had killed Lieutenant Selfridge, they were polite enough to keep it to themselves.

After take off, Cal buzzed Coney Island and dropped coupons for free Vin Fiz soda (above). Then he flew across Manhattan as the breathless reporters breathlessly reported, “…with its death-trap of tall buildings, ragged roofs and narrow streets”.  Cal landed safely in Middleton, New York that night to a cheering crowd reported as 10,000 – not to be bettered by San Francisco. He had made all of 84 miles that first day. His plan was to average 250 miles a day.

That night the reporters wrote that Cal claimed he would be in Chicago in four days. But Cal  rarely talked to reporters because he barely heard their questions, the byproduct of a scarlet fever attack in his childhood. And he spoke in the clumsy monotone of someone who never heard a human voice.  So it was easier if the the reporters just made up heroic quotes for Cal. They invented more heroic quotes for him the next morning when, on take off,  the "Vin Fiz" hit a tree and ended up in a chicken coop. The bottle of Vin Fiz was "miraculously" undamaged, as proved because it would have been impossible to find another bottle of Vin Fizz aboard a train car named "The Vin Fiz Special".  But now it was Cal’s turn to wait for repairs. The race was on!  It just wasn't going anywhere quickly.

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ACOLYTE OF TERROR

I begin by introducing you to the second son of a pretentious prater-progenitor of the provenance of panic, Jean-Baptiste Hertel. Born in 1678 in the forest outpost of Trois-Rivières on the St. Laurence River, midway between the fortress of Quebec (above)  and the trading station of Montreal, Jean-Baptiste had little choice but to be a warrior. In his distant motherland, the self absorbed Sun King, Louis XIV, was dissipating the treasures of France on European wars . Meanwhile, in the new world, dwarfed by the rapacious and prolific Protestant New England settlers to their south, and surrounded by the more numerous and often hostile Iroquois Confederacy, the Catholic people of “Canady” were left isolated and vulnerable.

Jean-Baptiste's father, Joseph Francis Hertel, raised his seven sons to follow the military and political strategy he had blazed – seemingly random and ruthless joint French and Indian raids descending without warning from the dark forests to burn English settler homes and mills and murder or kidnap the farmers, their wives and children. The French -Canadian objective was convince English settlers the frontier was too dangerous to claim, and to keep the English and the local tribes “irreconcilable enemies”, as the new Governor General of New France, Philippe Vaudreuil, put it.. 

And it worked. By the winter of 1704, when 34 year old Jean-Baptiste (above) set out to lead his first and most infamous raid, he was the best and brightest that New France had to offer the world, “An officer of great courage, but per-eminently cruel and vindictive.” In other words he was an effective and unapologetic terrorist.

Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste launched his first raid from the new wooden stockade at Fort Chambly (above), 15 miles south of Montreal, at the base of the falls on the Iroquois (aka Richelieu) River. 

Early in the new year, Jean-Baptiste's forty-eight experienced local militia (including three of his brothers) along with 200 Abenaki, Iroquois, Wyandot, and Pocumtuc warriors paddled upstream, south, to Lake Champlain, then southward again along the eastern shore to the mouth of the Winooski River. 

From here they marched on snowshoes one hundred miles to the southeast,  up the Winooski Valley which cut through the Green Mountains. Their greatest obstacle would be the 30 mile leg over the final ridge separating them from the White River that ran east before joining the Connecticut River. Here they were joined by 40 Pennacook warriors, before making the 60 mile march, due south, toward the English settlement of Deerfield, 300 miles from Fort Chambly.

The community of Deerfield had been established forty years earlier by farmers seeking both the rich Connecticut Valley soil and the 100 miles distance from the Puritanical leadership of Cotton Mather's Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

But in September of 1665, when the wagons baring the harvest paused just south of Deerfield to cross “Muddy Creek”,  Indians attacked the stalled wagons, killing 90 men, stealing the horses, stealing or destroying the year's crop, and rechristening the stream as “Bloody Creek”.. Without food for the coming winter, the 200 residents were forced to abandon the town.

Back in 1704, 30 miles north of Deerfield, Lt. Hertel established a cache of supplies for their return, just as his father, Joseph-Francis Hertel had done on that patriarch’s famous 1690 raid on Salmon Falls (above). In that predawn attack,  50 raiders (in old Cotton Mather's words, “Half Indianized Frenchmen, and half Frenchified Indians”) had dragged 35 English men, women and children from their beds and murdered them. And then burned the town to the ground.

 The “raiders” had then marched 54 mostly women and children away as prisoners. Any who could not keep up were killed. 

Once back in Canada the captives were divided up, and their fate depended on the whims of their new native masters. Prisoners that could later be ransomed from the Indians were the only bargaining chip  New France had with New England. The terror attack which cost just two wounded men, made Joseph-Francis  Hertel an official “Hero” in Quebec, and the governor applied to the Louis XIV to raise the family into the nobility. The only dark note for the French was that “Hero” Hertel was one of the wounded, and this would be his last raid.

The New Englanders reoccupied Deerfield in the 1690's. They repaired abandoned homes and built new ones, and strengthened the palisade in the center of town. Individual residents were still occasionally being killed by marauding warriors, so when, during late January of 1704 the 300 residents received word of a large raiding party spotted on Lake Champlain, 30 militiamen from the fishing villages of coastal Massachusetts were brought west to bolster the town's own 70 man militia force. But over the next month, the isolation, the cold, the snow and the long dark nights, bred complacency in the village and its guardians.

From their “cold camp” two miles north, Lieutenant Hertel made his final scout of Deerfield, noting the lax guards and the snow drifts left piled up against the northern wall of the stockade. It appeared the stage was set for Jean-Baptiste to better his father's 1690 triumph. An hour before dawn, Friday, 29 February, 1704, a handful of raiders used the drifts to clamber over the wooden walls and open the front gates, admitting invaders into the village's inner sanctum. At the same time, the Indian intruders burst into the outlying homes of other residents and began killing and destroying.

The new village minister, John Williams, was awakened as the Indian's burst into his home,  “with axes and hatchets... to the number of twenty, with painted faces, and hideous acclamations. I reached...for my pistol...I...put it to the breast of the first Indian who came up, but my pistol missing fire, I was seized by 3 Indians who disarmed me, and bound me naked...(they then) fell to rifling the house...some were so cruel and barbarous as to...carry to the door two of my children (John Jr.,6, and an infant daughter, Jerushah) as also a Negro woman” ( his slave Parthena), and murder them.   Perhaps the “barbarous” enemy were members of the Pocumtuc tribe, an entirly innocent village of whom had been butchered, man, woman and child, by the New Englanders a few winters earlier.

The noise of the assault on the William's home had awakened the seven guards sleeping in the house next door. When the raiders attempted to rush that building the militia shot down at least one of the attackers, forcing them into a costly firefight. 

The same confrontations were repeated inside the stockade, with the raiders suffering 2 Frenchmen and 9 Indians killed, and another 22 wounded, including Jean-Baptiste and one of his brothers. They had killed 39 villagers, and captured 112 prisoners. But the village remained, although almost half the  homes had been burned, and reinforcements were rushing to their relief. Fitting the adult captives with snow shoes and carrying the younger children on their shoulders through the 3 foot deep snow, Lt. Hertel's wounded force began to limp back to Canada.  Jean-Baptiste would now be forever known as “The Sacker of Deerfield”.

At least seven prisoners died within 48 hours – a male black slave murdered for sport by drunken Indians on the first night, two separate infants dashed against trees when the mothers could not keep up, two young girls and two adult women, including Reverend William's wife, all clubbed to death because they could not maintain the 12 miles a day demanded by the raiders. The raiders were forced to pause several times to bury their own, who had died from their wounds. In all, out of the 112 captives, 21 died or were murdered on the seven week long march back to Fort Chamby.  French and Indian losses must have at least equaled that number.

Governor General Vaudreuil would try to put the best face on “The Deerfield Masacure”,  but the raid proved to a political embarrassment  for New France. The French could no longer simply blame the Indians for the cruel murder of so many women and children. And because of their own high causalities, the native peoples proved difficult to recruit for any more raids, at least for a few years. Worse, the Indians were beginning to realize how valuable the English hostages were for their French partners, and their prices began to go up, which meant their profitability to New France went down.

Two years later 60 of the hostages, including Reverend Williams and four of his children, were returned to New England.   William's youngest surviving child, Eunice, converted to Catholicism and was adopted into a Mohawk family.  She, like many other of the younger children  chose to stay in Canada. She wrote to her father, but never visited her brothers and sisters until after their father had died, in 1721. Eunice married a Mohawk man and together they raised four children.

The Reverend William's book on his captivity, co-written with Cotton Mather, became one of the best selling books in colonial America. Most of “The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion” was an attack on Catholicism. Bu in post revolutionary war America, those stories which dealt with William's Indian captors were borrowed by James Fenimore Cooper, and incorporated into that author's 1826 classic, “The Last of the Mohicans”

Jean-Baptiste Hertel never led another raid by himself, and within a few years was quietly assigned other duties. In 1713 he was finally promoted to Captain, but that was as far as he got. He died in 1721, just a month after his terrorist trainer, 80 year Joseph-Francois Hertel, also died.    The acolyte of terror, his father's son, “The Sacker of Deerfield”, was just 54 years old, and offers a troubling hero for modern day French Canadians.  It is not enough to say, he did the best that he could, with what he was given.

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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.  And Tulips.

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 - in what is today Uzbekistan.

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. But 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 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 bulb. And because the bulbs could be transported thousands of miles, because they were purely ornamental, and because they had to be replaced every decade or so,  to own and grow them became a display of extreme wealth, conspicuous consumption, restricted to the ruling 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, personal portraits, and within ten years, ownership of the exotic tulip, so named because its bloom resembled the Dutch name given 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 a means of  measuring and achieving of wealth.

The Lord, it seemed, had designed the tulip to make humans rich, and more than 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 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 their pattern variations was being determined by a virus that was 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 the next spring bloom.

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 owner of all 12 bulbs was the wealthy  Adriaan Pauw.  

The law against selling tulips short had been reaffirmed in 1621, and again in 1630, and yet again in 1636. Clearly many burgomasters saw the practice of betting on a catastrophe as dangerous. At the same time it seems safe to assume there were few bets being made that the price of tulip bulbs was going to go down, since no penalties were ever attached to a violation. The general feeling in Holland seems to have been (as it is in America today about the big banks and hedge funds ) that everybody could continue making money as long as everybody stayed greedy but smart. But that has never happened in all of human history. And it did not happen in 17th Century Holland - first because the traders were not trading in what they thought they were trading in, which was tulips, but in a virus which infected tulips. And second I have now arrived at the central theme of this essay -  greed makes you stupid.

Adriaan Pauw thought he was smart. 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 12 prized  Augusttus were valued at 1,200 guilders each. The next year that went up to 2,000 guilders each, and in 1626 up to 3,000 guilders for a single bulb. Inflation spread like a virus to all varieties of tulips. During one two year period the price for a “General of Generals” bulb increased from 100 guilders to 750 guilders. On 5 February, 1637 at an auction held in the lake side fortress village of Alkmarr, 70 rare bulbs sold for 53,000 guilders, an all time high - several hundred million American dollars today. Who could resist such temptation? Not  Pauw.  He finally sold a single bulb of Augusttus for 5,500 guilders. But the bloom was about to fall off the rose - ah, tulip.

Just two days earlier and 20 miles to the south in the village of Harrlem, a tulip investor club – called a college – decided to see how deep the demand for tulips really was. They held an auction of a huge quantity of common bulbs. 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, prices of tulips collapsed like the price of baseball trading cards or houses in 2007.  Many varieties of tulips would quickly lose 95% of their value.

Families went bankrupt -  heads of households and sons committed suicide - how many has become a subject for much debate in economic circles. 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. But why get God involved when there are so many lawyers around? There were endless lawsuits, because every buyer wanted out of their futures contracts and every seller wanted them enforced. So the politicians did nothing.   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 written by A Maurits van der Veen, from the Virginia college of William and Mary. (BUBBLE)   He wrote in 2009, “...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 on other tulip investors - call it the tulip derivatives market. That was where the market had first blown up. Sounds like a market bubble to me. And when Tulip mania died, so did some of the most valuable tulips, because their viruses were not passed on. There has not been a Semper Augusttus bloom 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 morally and functionally superior to regulated markets. But Semper Augusttus was not a true species, but the by-product of Potyviridae devouring the tulip from the inside, consuming its genetic code, and eventually killing the bulb and flower.  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  Some day, perhaps, the nouveau riche of a new age will come to admit that like the Potyviridea infected tulip, an unregulated  “free market”, is merely a splash of color which distracts your attention from the parasite devouring capitalism from the inside - unrestricted uninhibited greed, leading to unrestricted, uninhibited stupidity.

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