3
Where Does the Tulipmania Legend Come From?
Given its strategic position in current views of tulipmania, it is vital to investigate from which sources Mackay constructed his version of the speculation. While at one point Mackay includes a minor citation to Johann Beckmann, he plagiarized most of his description from Beckmann with a little literary embellishment.4 Beckmann, the original source of the sailor and dissector anecdotes referred to in the previous chapter, cites Blainville (1743) as his source for the story about the Englishman. A careful reading of Blainville, however, turns up only a one-sentence report that a tulip speculation occurred from 1634–1637 in what is otherwise a baroque travel log of Haarlem. Indeed, Blainville’s description of his travels through Holland was a diary of a tour made in 1705, seventy years after the speculation. For the sailor story, Beckmann mentions that the incident occurred while John Balthasar Schuppe (1610–1661) was in Holland, without other reference. However, the context of the paragraph in which the story appears seems to
