It's a raw February morning in 1637, and in a back room in a tavern in Harlem, a town about 20 kilometers from Amsterdam, a man lifts a seemingly lucrative contract and asks the crowd for a price.
He waits, and asks again.
And then, for the first time anyone can remember, the room goes quiet.
Nobody bids.
Just a week earlier, contracts like this had been fiercely fought over.
Now, suddenly, almost nobody wants one.
And this contract wasn't for gold.
land, or a ship.
It was for a batch of flowers that hadn't even bloomed yet.
That alone sounds absurd, but it gets stranger.
