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REVIVING HOPES AND BRIGHTENING PROSPECTS.

Dick Sands the Boy Captain by Jules Verne, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . HOPE REVIVED here HOPE REVIVED The wind had now increased to a hurricane; it had veered to the south-west, and had attained a velocity little short of ninety miles an hour. On land, the most substantial of erections could with difficulty have withstood its violence, and a vessel anchored in a roadstead must have been torn from its moorings and cast ashore. The memorable storm that had devastated the Island of Guadaloupe on the 25th of July, 1825, when heavy cannon were lifted from their carriages, could scarcely have been more furious, and it was only her mobility before the blast and the solidity of her structure that gave the "Pilgrim" a hope of surviving the tempest. A few minutes after the topsail had been lost, the small jib was carried away. Dick Sands contemplated the possibility of throwing out a storm-jib, made of extra strong canvas, as a means of bringing the ship a little more under his control, but abandoned the idea as useless. It was, therefore, under bare poles that the "Pilgrim" was driven along; but in spite of the lack of canvas, the hull, masts, and rigging, gave sufficient purchase to the wind, and the progress of the schooner was prodigiously rapid; sometimes, indeed, she seemed to be literally lifted from the water, and scudded on, scarcely skimming its surface. The rolling was fearful. Enormous waves followed in quick succession, and as they travelled faster than the ship, there was the perpetual risk of one of them catching her astern. Without sail, there were no means of escaping that peril by increase of speed; the adroit management of the helm was the only chance of avoiding the hazardous shocks, and even this repeatedly failed. To prevent his being washed overboard Dick lashed himself to his place at the wheel by a rope round his waist, and made Tom and Bat keep close at hand, ready to give him assistance, in case of emergency. Hercules and ActÃ¦on, clinging to the bitt, kept watch at the bow. Mrs. Weldon and her party, at Dick's special request, remained inside the stern cabin, although the lady, for her own part, would much rather have stayed on deck; she had, however, yielded to the representation that she would thus be exposing herself to unnecessary danger. The hatchways were hermetically closed, and it was to be hoped that they would withstand the heavy sea that was dashing over them; only let one of them give way to the pressure, and the vessel must inevitably fill and founder. It was a matter of congratulation that the stowage had been done very carefully, so that notwithstanding all the lurchings of the ship, the cargo did not shift in the least. The heroic young commander had still further curtailed his periods of rest, and it was only at the urgent entreaty of Mrs. Weldon, who feared that he would exhaust himself by his vigilance, that he was induced to lie down for a few hours' sleep on the night of the 13th. After Tom and Bat had been left alone at the wheel they were, somewhat to their surprise, joined by Negoro, who very rarely came aft. He seemed inclined to enter into conversation, but found little encouragement to talk on the part either of Tom or his son. All at once a violent roll of the ship threw him off his feet, and he would have gone overboard if he had not been saved by falling against the binnacle. Old Tom was in a frantic state of alarm lest the compass should be broken. He uttered a cry of consternation so loud that it roused Dick from the light slumber into which he had fallen in the cabin, and he rushed to the deck. By the time he had reached the stern, Negoro had not only regained his feet, but had managed successfully to conceal [Illustration: Quick as lightning, Dick Sands drew a revolver from his pocket.] the bit of iron which he had again extracted from beneath the binnacle where he had himself laid it. Now that the wind had shifted to the south-west, it suited his machinations that the magnetic needle should indicate its true direction. "How now?" asked Dick eagerly; "what is the meaning of all this noise?" Tom explained how the cook had fallen against the binnacle, and how he had been terrified lest the compass should be injured. Dick's heart sank at the thought of losing his sole remaining compass, and his anxiety betrayed itself in his countenance as he knelt down to examine its condition; but he breathed freely as he ascertained that the instrument had sustained no damage; by the dim light he saw the needle resting on its two concentric circles, and felt his fears at once relieved; of course, he was quite unconscious of the fact that the removal of the bit of iron had made the magnet change its pointing. The incident, however, excited his misgiving; although he felt that Negoro could not be held responsible for an accidental fall, the very presence of the man in such a place at such a time perplexed him. "And what brings you here, this hour of the night?" he asked. "That's not your business," retorted Negoro insolently. "It is my business," replied Dick resolutely; "and I mean to have an answer; what brought you here?" Negoro answered sullenly that he knew of no rule to prevent his going where he liked and when he liked. "No rule!" cried Dick; "then I make the rule now. From this time forward, I make the rule that you shall never come astern. Do you understand?" Roused from his accustomed doggedness, the man seemed to make a threatening movement. Quick as lightning, Dick Sands drew a revolver from his pocket. "Negoro, one act, one word of insubordination, and I blow out your brains!" Negoro had no time to reply; before he could speak he was bowed down towards the deck by an irresistible weight. Hercules had grasped him by the shoulder. "Shall I put him overboard, captain? he will make a meal for the fishes; they are not very particular what they eat," said the negro, with a grin of contempt. "Not yet," quietly answered Dick. The giant removed his hand, and Negoro stood upright again, and began to retreat to his own quarters, muttering, however, as he passed Hercules,- "You cursed nigger! You shall pay for this!" The discovery was now made that the wind apparently had taken a sudden shift of no less than forty-five degrees; but what occasioned Dick the greatest perplexity was that there was nothing in the condition of the sea to correspond with the alteration in the current of the air; instead of being directly astern, wind and waves were now beating on the larboard. Progress in this way must necessarily be full of danger, and Dick was obliged to bring his ship up at least four points before he got her straight before the tempest. The young captain felt that he must be more than ever on the alert; he could not shake off the suspicion that Negoro had been concerned in the loss of the first compass, and had some further designs upon the second. Still he was utterly at a loss to imagine what possible motive the man could have for so criminal an act of malevolence, as there was no plausible reason to be assigned why he should not be as anxious as all the rest to reach the coast of America. The suspicion continued, however, to haunt him, and when he mentioned it to Mrs. Weldon he found that a similar feeling of distrust had agitated her, although she, like himself, was altogether unable to allege a likely motive why the cook should contemplate so strange an act of mischief. It was determined that a strict surveillance should be kept upon all the fellow's movements. Negoro, however, manifested no inclination to disobey the captain's peremptory order; he kept strictly to his own part of the ship; but as Dingo was now regularly quartered on the stern, there was a tolerably sure guarantee that the cook would not be found wandering much in that direction. A week passed, and still the tempest showed no signs of abating; the barometer continued to fall, and not once did a period of calmer weather afford an opportunity of carrying sail. The "Pilgrim" still made her way northeast. Her speed could not be less than two hundred miles in twenty-four hours. But no land appeared. Vast as was the range of the American continent, extending for 120 degrees between the Atlantic and the Pacific, it was nowhere to be discerned. Was he dreaming? was he mad? Dick would perpetually ask himself: had he been sailing in a wrong direction? had he failed to steer aright? But no: he was convinced there was no error in his steering. Although he could not actually see it for the mist, he knew that day after day the sun rose before him, and that it set behind him. Yet he was constrained in bewilderment to ask, what had become of those shores of America upon which, when they came in sight, there was only too great a fear the ship should be dashed? what had become of them? where were they? whither had this incessant hurricane driven them? why did not the expected coast appear? To all these bewildering inquiries Dick could find no answer except to imagine that his compass had misled him. Yet he was powerless to put his own misgivings to the test; he deplored more than ever the destruction of the duplicate instrument which would have checked his registers. He studied his chart; but all in vain; the position in which he found himself as the result of Negoro's treachery, seemed to baffle him the more, the more he tried to solve the mystery. The days were passing on in this chronic state of anxiety, when one morning about eight o'clock, Hercules, who was on watch at the fore, suddenly shouted,- "Land!" Dick Sands had little reliance upon the negro's inexperienced eye, but hurried forward to the bow. "Where's the land?" he cried; his voice being scarcely audible above the howling of the tempest. "There! look there!" said Hercules, nodding his head and pointing over the larboard side, to the north-east. Dick could see nothing. Mrs. Weldon had heard the shout. Unable to restrain her interest, she had left her cabin and was at Dick's side. He uttered an expression of surprise at seeing her, but could not hear anything she said, as her voice was unable to rise above the roaring of the elements; she stood, her whole being as it were concentrated in the power of vision, and scanned the horizon in the direction indicated by Hercules. But all to no purpose. Suddenly, however, after a while, Dick raised his hand. "Yes!" he said; "yes; sure enough, yonder is land." He clung with excitement to the netting; and Mrs Weldon, supported by Hercules, strained her eyes yet more vehemently to get a glimpse of a shore which she had begun to despair of ever reaching. Beyond a doubt an elevated peak was there. It must be about ten miles to leeward. A break in the clouds soon left it more distinct. Some promontory it must be upon the American coast. Without sails, of course, the "Pilgrim" had no chance of bearing down direct upon it; but at least there was every reason to believe that she would soon reach some other portion of the shore; perhaps before noon, certainly in a few hours, they must be close to land. The pitching of the ship made it impossible for Mrs. Weldon to keep safe footing on the deck; accordingly, at a sign from Dick, Hercules led her back again to her cabin. Dick did not remain long at the bow, but went thoughtfully back to the wheel. He had, indeed, a tremendous responsibility before him. Here was the land, the land for which they had longed so eagerly; and now that their anticipations were on the point of being realized, what was there, with a hurricane driving them on towards it, to prevent that land being their destruction? What measures could he take to prevent the schooner being dashed to pieces against it? [Illustration: "There! look there!"] At the very moment when the promontory was just abreast of them, Negoro appeared on deck; he nodded to the peak familiarly, as he might have saluted a familiar friend, and retired as stealthily as he had come. Two hours later, and the promontory was lying to the larboard wake. Dick Sands had never relaxed his watchfulness, but he had failed to discover any further indications of a coast-line. His perplexity could only increase; the horizon was clear; the Andes ought to be distinct; they would be conspicuous twenty miles or more away. Dick took up his telescope again and again; he scrutinized the eastern horizon with minutest care; but there was nothing to be seen; and as the afternoon waned away the last glimpse had been taken of the promontory that had awakened their expectation; it had vanished utterly from their gaze; no indication of shore could be seen from the "Pilgrim's" deck. Dick Sands uttered a sigh of mingled amazement and relief. He went into Mrs. Weldon's cabin, where she was standing with her party. "It was only an island!" he said; "only an island!" "How? why? what island? what do you mean?" cried Mrs. Weldon incredulously; "what island can it be?" "The chart perhaps will tell us," replied Dick; and hurrying off to his own cabin, he immediately returned with the chart in his hands. After studying it attentively for a few minutes, he said,- "There, Mrs. Weldon; the land we have just passed, I should suppose must be that little speck in the midst of the Pacific. It must be Easter Island. At least, there seems to be no other land which possibly it could be." "And do you say," inquired Mrs. Weldon, "that we have left it quite behind us?" "Yes, entirely; almost to windward." Mrs. Weldon commenced a searching scrutiny of the map that was outspread before her. "How far is this," she said, after bending a considerable time over the chart; "how far is this from the coast of America?" "Thirty-five degrees," answered Dick; "somewhere about 2500 miles." "What ever do you mean?" rejoined the lady astonished; "if the 'Pilgrim' is still 2500 miles from shore, she has positively made no progress at all. Impossible!" In thoughtful perplexity, Dick passed his hand across his brow. He did not know what to say. After an interval of silence, he said,- "I have no account to give for the strange delay. It is inexplicable to myself, except upon that one hypothesis, which I cannot resist, that the readings of the compass, somehow or other, have been wrong." He relapsed into silence. Then, brightening up, he added,- "But, thank God! at least we have now the satisfaction of knowing where we really are; we are no longer lost upon the wide Pacific; if only this hurricane will cease, long as the distance seems, we are on our proper course to the shores of America." The tone of confidence with which the youthful captain spoke had the effect of inspiring new hope into all who heard him; their spirits rose, and to their sanguine mood it seemed as if they were approaching to the end of all their troubles, and had hardly more to do than to await the turning of a tide to bring them into a glad proximity to port. Easter Island, of which the true name is Vai-Hoo, was discovered by David in 1686 and visited by Cook and LapÃ©rouse. It lies in lat. 27Â° S., and long. 112 E.; consequently, it was evident that during the raging of the hurricane the schooner had been driven northwards no less than fifteen degrees. Far away, however, as she was from shore, the wind could hardly fail within ten days to carry her within sight of land; and then, if the storm had worn itself out, (as probably it would,) the "Pilgrim" would again hoist sail, and make her way into some port with safety. Anyhow, the discovery of his true position restored a spirit of confidence to Dick Sands, and he anticipated the time when he should no longer be drifting helplessly before the storm. To say the truth, the "Pilgrim" had suffered very little from the prolonged fury of the weather. The damage she had sustained was limited to the loss of the topsail and the small jib, which could be easily replaced. The caulking of the seams remained thoroughly sound, and no drop of water had found its way into the hold. The pumps, too, were perfectly free. Dick Sands did not fear for the stability of his ship; his only anxiety was lest the weather should not moderate in time. Only let the wind subside, and the schooner once more would be under his control; but he never forgot that the ordering of the winds and waves were in the hands of the Great Disposer of all. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jules Verne (2005). Dick sands, the boy Captain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3250.html.images This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

HOPE REVIVED

The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery by Richard Hakluyt is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . REVIVAL OF THE NORTHWEST THEORY REVIVAL OF THE NORTHWEST THEORY To Humphrey Gilbert belongs the credit for so reviving the Northwest Passage theory as to turn the thoughts of English merchants and statesmen to adventure and to colonization in America; while Martin Frobisher was the first English navigator fairly to begin the Northwest explorations. Gilbert, born in 1539, in the county of Devon, was the son of a country gentleman, half-brother of Walter Raleigh, on the mother’s side, an Eton schoolboy and an Oxford man, bred to the law, but taking instead to adventure. When a soldier in Ireland, in 1566–1567, a captain under Sir Henry Sidney against the Irish rebellion, his mind was busied with speculation on cosmography; and in the latter year, being sent home with despatches by Sidney, he took occasion to present to Queen Elizabeth, whose favour he enjoyed, a petition for privileges “concerning the discoverings of a passage by the North to go to Cathaie.” This, it is said, was an alternative to the earlier memorial of Anthony Jenkinson and himself for royal patronage to a new expedition of discovery by the Northeast. Both petitions lay unanswered, and he returned to soldiering. In 1570 he was knighted for his services in Ireland, the previous year having been given the government of Münster. In 1571, back in England, he was a member of Parliament for Plymouth. The next year he was fighting in the Netherlands, the first colonel in command of English forces there. Returned again to England, he temporarily retired to country-life at Limehouse, employing his leisure in further geographical investigations and in writing a learned Discourse of a Discovery for a New Passage to Cathaia, partly, it is assumed, in support of his petition still before the queen. One day in the winter of 1574 he showed the manuscript of the Discourse to his friend George Gascoigne, one of the pioneer Elizabethan poets, who afterward edited and published it. Meanwhile it led to the granting of a license by the Fellowship of English Merchants, in 1575, to Martin Frobisher with “divers gentlemen,” out of which grew Frobisher’s Northwest voyage. MARTIN FROBISHER. Martin Frobisher was of Welsh origin, but of English birth, born in Yorkshire in about 1535. He was now a thoroughly seasoned mariner, having followed the sea from his nineteenth year, going out for a decade in yearly voyages of merchant ships sent to Africa or the Levant by Sir John and Thomas Lock; and afterward employed in the queen’s service, in 1571 off Ireland. He had before this time become “thoroughly furnished of the knowledge of the sphere and all other skilles appertaining to the arte of navigation,” as the historian of his voyages, George Best, assures us, and as early as 1560 he had conceived a project for discovery of the short route by the Northwest to “Cathay” and the Indies, and had begun looking about for support for it. During the next fifteen years he schemed to this end, conferring with his “private friends of these secrets,” importuning members of the Fellowship of English Merchants to back him, soliciting men of estate and title, and even the court. But he met little encouragement till his public service in Ireland had brought him under the favourable notice of the queen and the attention of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. At length toward the close of 1574 the queen, moved apparently by Sir Humphrey’s Discourse, still in manuscript, addressed a letter to the Fellowship of English Merchants calling upon them either to despatch an expedition to the Northwest or transfer their privileges in that direction to other adventurers: and sent this pregnant message by the hand of Frobisher. The result was the issue, February, 1575, of their license for his first voyage. Gilbert’s Discourse is given by Hakluyt presumably as published by Gascoigne, in 1576, but with his own caption: “A Discourse written by Sir Humfrey Gilbert Knight, to prove a passage by the Northwest to Cathaia and the East Indies.” It is an essay in ten chapters displaying not a little erudition and mastery of his subject. The chapter-heads show its trend: “1. To prove by authoritie a passage to be on the North side of America to go to Cathaia, China, and to the East India. 2. To prove by reason a passage to be on the North side of America to go to Cathaia, Molucæ &c. 3. To prove by experience of sundry mens travailes [travels] the opening of this Northwest passage, whereby good hope remaineth of the rest. 4. To prove by circumstance that the Northwest passage has been sailed throughout. 5. To proove that such Indians as have bene driven upon the coastes of Germanie came not thither by the Southeast, and Southwest, nor from any part of Afrike or America. 6. To proove that the Indians aforenamed came not from the Northeast; and that there is no thorow [through] passage navigable that way. 7. To prove that these Indians came by the Northwest which induceth a certaintie of this passage by experience. 8. What several reasons were alleaged before the Queens Majestie, and certaine Lords of her Highnesse privie Council by M. Anth. Jenkinson a Gentleman of great travaile and experience, to prove this passage by the Northeast, with my severall answeres then alleaged to the same. 9. How that this passage by the Northwest is more commodious for our traffike then [than] the other by the Northeast, if there were any such. 10. What commodities would ensue, this passage being once discovered.” The quaint opening paragraph expresses succinctly his theory and the steps by which he had reached it: “When I gave my selfe to the studie of Geographie, after I had perused and diligently scanned the descriptions of Europe, Asia, and Afrike, and conferred them with the Mappes and Globe, both Antique and Moderne: I came in fine to the fourth part of the world, commonly called America, which by all descriptions I found to bee an Island environed round about with Sea, having on the Southeside of it the frete or straight of Magellan, on the West side Mar del Sur, which sea runneth towards the North, separating it from the East parts of Asia, where the Dominions of the Cathaians are: on the East part an West Ocean, and on the North side the sea that severeth it from Groneland [Greenland] thorow which Northren Sea the Passage lyeth, which I take now in hand to discover.” In the concluding paragraph we have an exhibition of Sir Humphrey’s highmindedness and his chivalrous devotion of himself to his country: "Desiring you hereafter never to mislike with me for the taking in hande of any laudable and honest enterprise: for if through pleasure or idleness we purchase shame the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame remaineth forever. And therefore to give me leave without offence, always to live and die in this mind, That he is not worthy to live at all that for feare, or danger of death, shunneth his countries service and his owne honour: seeing death is inevitable, and the fame of vertue immortall. Wherefore in this behalfe, Mutare vel timere sperno." Frobisher’s initial voyage was financed, in the language of to-day, principally by Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The total amount subscribed for the venture was but eight hundred and seventy-five pounds. Two small barks, the “Gabriel,” of twenty-five tons, and the “Michael” of twenty tons, with a pinnace of ten tons, were furnished, and provisioned for ten months. The company were small but well selected. Christopher Hall, the master of the “Gabriel,” and Frobisher’s right hand, was an experienced mariner in the Northern seas, and had presumably sailed with Frobisher in one or another of his eastern voyages. Among his charts Frobisher is supposed to have included the Zeno map, delineating the fourteenth century discoveries of the Venetian brothers Zeno, then comparatively new, having been brought to light in Italy in 1558. The tiny fleet set sail from Ratcliffe on the seventh of June (1576), but at Detford came to anchor, the pinnace having “burst” her “boultsprit” and foremast, in coming against a ship that was riding there. The next day making a fresh start they bore down on Greenwich, where the court yet was. Here, as a quarter of a century before the Willoughby-Chancellor fleet had done when passing out by the boy king’s court, they made the “best shew” they could by shooting off their ordnance, while Queen Elizabeth waved her hand from a window in affectionate farewell. Afterward the queen sent one of her courtiers aboard the “Gabriel” with a message declaring her “good liking for our doings,” and summoning Frobisher to the court to take personal leave of her. The same day—the narrator is Christopher Hall—"towards night, M. Secretarie Woolly came aboord of us and declared to the company that her Majesty had appointed him to give them charge to be obedient and diligent to their Captaine and governors in all things, and wished us happie successe." Accounts of this voyage were written in terse sailor fashion by Christopher Hall, and with more detail and colour by George Best, the historian of all of Frobisher’s Northwest expeditions. Hakluyt gives the text of both. Hall’s appears under this title: “The first Voyage of M. Martine Frobisher to the Northwest for the search of the straight or passage to China, written by Christopher Hall, Master in the Gabriel, and made in the yeere of our Lord 1576.” Best’s is an extended monograph thus entitled: “A true Discourse of the three Voyages of Discoverie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya, by the Northwest, under the conduct of Martin Frobisher Generall: Before which, as a necessary preface, is prefixed a two-folde discourse, conteining certaine reasons to prove all partes of the World habitable. Penned by Master George Best, a Gentleman employed in the same voyages.” From these two narrations, the one supplying details omitted by the other, the full graphic story is to be drawn. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Richard Hakluyt (2018). The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57917/pg57917-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

REVIVAL OF THE NORTHWEST THEORY

A Short History of the World, by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS Throughout the twelfth century there were many signs that the European intelligence was recovering courage and leisure, and preparing to take up again the intellectual enterprises of the first Greek scientific enquiries and such speculations as those of the Italian Lucretius. The causes of this revival were many and complex. The suppression of private war, the higher standards of comfort and security that followed the crusades, and the stimulation of men’s minds by the experiences of these expeditions were no doubt necessary preliminary conditions. Trade was reviving; cities were recovering ease and safety; the standard of education was arising in the church and spreading among laymen. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a period of growing, independent or quasi-independent cities; Venice, Florence, Genoa, Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, London, Antwerp, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Novgorod, Wisby and Bergen for example. They were all trading cities with many travellers, and where men trade and travel they talk and think. The polemics of the Popes and princes, the conspicuous savagery and wickedness of the persecution of heretics, were exciting men to doubt the authority of the church and question and discuss fundamental things. We have seen how the Arabs were the means of restoring Aristotle to Europe, and how such a prince as Frederick II acted as a channel through which Arabic philosophy and science played upon the renascent European mind. Still more influential in the stirring up of men’s ideas were the Jews. Their very existence was a note of interrogation to the claims of the church. And finally the secret, fascinating enquiries of the alchemists were spreading far and wide and setting men to the petty, furtive and yet fruitful resumption of experimental science. And the stir in men’s minds was by no means confined now to the independent and well educated. The mind of the common man was awake in the world as it had never been before in all the experience of mankind. In spite of priest and persecution, Christianity does seem to have carried a mental ferment wherever its teaching reached. It established a direct relation between the conscience of the individual man and the God of Righteousness, so that now if need arose he had the courage to form his own judgment upon prince or prelate or creed. As early as the eleventh century philosophical discussion had begun again in Europe, and there were great and growing universities at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and other centres. There medieval “schoolmen” took up again and thrashed out a series of questions upon the value and meaning of words that were a necessary preliminary to clear thinking in the scientific age that was to follow. And standing by himself because of his distinctive genius was Roger Bacon (circa 1210 to circa 1293), a Franciscan of Oxford, the father of modern experimental science. His name deserves a prominence in our history second only to that of Aristotle. His writings are one long tirade against ignorance. He told his age it was ignorant, an incredibly bold thing to do. Nowadays a man may tell the world it is as silly as it is solemn, that all its methods are still infantile and clumsy and its dogmas childish assumptions, without much physical danger; but these peoples of the middle ages when they were not actually being massacred or starving or dying of pestilence, were passionately convinced of the wisdom, the completeness and finality of their beliefs, and disposed to resent any reflections upon them very bitterly. Roger Bacon’s writings were like a flash of light in a profound darkness. He combined his attack upon the ignorance of his times with a wealth of suggestion for the increase of knowledge. In his passionate insistence upon the need of experiment and of collecting knowledge, the spirit of Aristotle lives again in him. “Experiment, experiment,” that is the burthen of Roger Bacon. Yet of Aristotle himself Roger Bacon fell foul. He fell foul of him because men, instead of facing facts boldly, sat in rooms and pored over the bad Latin translations which were then all that was available of the master. “If I had my way,” he wrote, in his intemperate fashion, “I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and increase ignorance,” a sentiment that Aristotle would probably have echoed could he have returned to a world in which his works were not so much read as worshipped—and that, as Roger Bacon showed, in these most abominable translations. AN EARLY PRINTING PRESS (From an old print) Throughout his books, a little disguised by the necessity of seeming to square it all with orthodoxy for fear of the prison and worse, Roger Bacon shouted to mankind, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities; look at the world!” Four chief sources of ignorance he denounced; respect for authority, custom, the sense of the ignorant crowd, and the vain, proud unteachableness of our dispositions. Overcome but these, and a world of power would open to men: — “Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, so that great ships suited to river or ocean, guided by one man, may be borne with greater speed than if they were full of men. Likewise cars may be made so that without a draught animal they may be moved cum impetu inœstimable, as we deem the scythed chariots to have been from which antiquity fought. And flying machines are possible, so that a man may sit in the middle turning some device by which artificial wings may beat the air in the manner of a flying bird.” So Roger Bacon wrote, but three more centuries were to elapse before men began any systematic attempts to explore the hidden stores of power and interest he realized so clearly existed beneath the dull surface of human affairs. But the Saracenic world not only gave Christendom the stimulus of its philosophers and alchemists; it also gave it paper. It is scarcely too much to say that paper made the intellectual revival of Europe possible. Paper originated in China, where its use probably goes back to the second century B.C. In 751 the Chinese made an attack upon the Arab Moslems in Samarkand; they were repulsed, and among the prisoners taken from them were some skilled papermakers, from whom the art was learnt. Arabic paper manuscripts from the ninth century onward still exist. The manufacture entered Christendom either through Greece or by the capture of Moorish paper-mills during the Christian reconquest of Spain. But under the Christian Spanish the product deteriorated sadly. Good paper was not made in Christian Europe until the end of the thirteenth century, and then it was Italy which led the world. Only by the fourteenth century did the manufacture reach Germany, and not until the end of that century was it abundant and cheap enough for the printing of books to be a practicable business proposition. Thereupon printing followed naturally and necessarily, for printing is the most obvious of inventions, and the intellectual life of the world entered upon a new and far more vigorous phase. It ceased to be a little trickle from mind to mind; it became a broad flood, in which thousands and presently scores and hundreds of thousands of minds participated. One immediate result of this achievement of printing was the appearance of an abundance of Bibles in the world. Another was a cheapening of school-books. The knowledge of reading spread swiftly. There was not only a great increase of books in the world, but the books that were now made were plainer to read and so easier to understand. Instead of toiling at a crabbed text arid then thinking over its significance, readers now could think unimpeded as they read. With this increase in the facility of reading, the reading public grew. The book ceased to be a highly decorated toy or a scholar’s mystery. People began to write books to be read as well as looked at by ordinary people. They wrote in the ordinary language and not in Latin. With the fourteenth century the real history of the European literature begins. So far we have been dealing only with the Saracenic share in the European revival. Let us turn now to the influence of the Mongol conquests. They stimulated the geographical imagination of Europe enormously. For a time under the Great Khan, all Asia and Western Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily open, and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. Great hopes were entertained by the papacy for the conversion of the Mongols to Christianity. Their only religion so far had been Shumanism, a primitive paganism. Envoys of the Pope, Buddhist priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese artificers, Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab officials and Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not enough of their curiosity and desire for learning. Not perhaps as an originative people, but as transmitters of knowledge and method their influence upon the world’s history has been very great. And everything one can learn of the vague and romantic personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the impression that these men were at least as understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but egotistical figure Alexander the Great or that raiser of political ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian Charlemagne. One of the most interesting of these visitors to the Mongol Court was a certain Venetian, Marco Polo, who afterwards set down his story in a book. He went to China about 1272 with his father and uncle, who had already once made the journey. The Great Khan had been deeply impressed by the elder Polos; they were the first men of the “Latin” peoples he had seen; and he sent them back with enquiries for teachers and learned men who could explain Christianity to him, and for various other European things that had aroused his curiosity. Their visit with Marco was their second visit. ANCIENT BRONZE FIGURE FROM BENIN, W. AFRICA Note evidence in attire of knowledge of early European explorers (In the British Museum) The three Polos started by way of Palestine and not by the Crimea, as in their previous expedition. They had with them a gold tablet and other indications from the Great Khan that must have greatly facilitated their journey. The Great Khan had asked for some oil from the lamp that burns in the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem; and so thither they first went, and then by way of Cilicia into Armenia. They went thus far north because the Sultan of Egypt was raiding the Mongol domains at this time. Thence they came by way of Mesopotamia to Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, as if they contemplated a sea voyage. At Ormuz they met merchants from India. For some reason they did not take ship, but instead turned northward through the Persian deserts, and so by way of Balkh over the Pamir to Kashgar, and by way of Kotan and the Lob Nor into the Hwang-ho valley and on to Pekin. At Pekin was the Great Khan, and they were hospitably entertained. ANOTHER ANCIENT NEGRO BRONZE OF A EUROPEAN (In the British Museum) Marco particularly pleased Kublai; he was young and clever, and it is clear he had mastered the Tartar language very thoroughly. He was given an official position and sent on several missions, chiefly in south-west China. The tale he had to tell of vast stretches of smiling and prosperous country, “all the way excellent hostelries for travellers,” and “fine vineyards, fields, and gardens,” of “many abbeys” of Buddhist monks, of manufactures of “cloth of silk and gold and many fine taffetas,” a “constant succession of cities and boroughs,” and so on, first roused the incredulity and then fired the imagination of all Europe. He told of Burmah, and of its great armies with hundreds of elephants, and how these animals were defeated by the Mongol bowmen, and also of the Mongol conquest of Pegu. He told of Japan, and greatly exaggerated the amount of gold in that country. For three years Marco ruled the city of Yang-chow as governor, and he probably impressed the Chinese inhabitants as being little more of a foreigner than any Tartar would have been. He may also have been sent on a mission to India. Chinese records mention a certain Polo attached to the imperial council in 1277, a very valuable confirmation of the general truth of the Polo story. The publication of Marco Polo’s travels produced a profound effect upon the European imagination. The European literature, and especially the European romance of the fifteenth century, echoes with the names in Marco Polo’s story, with Cathay (North China) and Cambulac (Pekin) and the like. EARLY ITALIAN ENGRAVING OF A SAILING SHIP (In the British Museum) Two centuries later, among the readers of the Travels of Marco Polo was a certain Genoese mariner, Christopher Columbus, who conceived the brilliant idea of sailing westward round the world to China. In Seville there is a copy of the Travels with marginal notes by Columbus. There were many reasons why the thought of a Genoese should be turned in this direction. Until its capture by the Turks in 1453 Constantinople had been an impartial trading mart between the Western world and the East, and the Genoese had traded there freely. But the “Latin” Venetians, the bitter rivals of the Genoese, had been the allies and helpers of the Turks against the Greeks, and with the coming of the Turks Constantinople turned an unfriendly face upon Genoese trade. The long forgotten discovery that the world was round had gradually resumed its sway over men’s minds. The idea of going westward to China was therefore a fairly obvious one. It was encouraged by two things. The mariner’s compass had now been invented and men were no longer left to the mercy of a fine night and the stars to determine the direction in which they were sailing, and the Normans, Catalonians and Genoese and Portuguese had already pushed out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary Isles, Madeira and the Azores. Yet Columbus found many difficulties before he could get ships to put his idea to the test. He went from one European Court to another. Finally at Granada, just won from the Moors, he secured the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and was able to set out across the unknown ocean in three small ships. After a voyage of two months and nine days he came to a land which he believed to be India, but which was really a new continent, whose distinct existence the old world had never hitherto suspected. He returned to Spain with gold, cotton, strange beasts and birds, and two wild- eyed painted Indians to be baptized. They were called Indians because, to the end of his days, he believed that this land he had found was India. Only in the course of several years did men begin to realize that the whole new continent of America was added to the world’s resources. The success of Columbus stimulated overseas enterprise enormously. In 1497 the Portuguese sailed round Africa to India, and in 1515 there were Portuguese ships in Java. In 1519 Magellan, a Portuguese sailor in Spanish employment, sailed out of Seville westward with five ships, of which one, the Vittoria, came back up the river to Seville in 1522, the first ship that had ever circumnavigated the world. Thirty-one men were aboard her, survivors of two-hundred-and- eighty who had started. Magellan himself had been killed in the Philippine Isles. Printed paper books, a new realization of the round world as a thing altogether attainable, a new vision of strange lands, strange animals and plants, strange manners and customs, discoveries overseas and in the skies and in the ways and materials of life burst upon the European mind. The Greek classics, buried and forgotten for so long, were speedily being printed and studied, and were colouring men’s thoughts with the dreams of Plato and the traditions of an age of republican freedom and dignity. The Roman dominion had first brought law and order to Western Europe, and the Latin Church had restored it; but under both Pagan and Catholic Rome curiosity and innovation were subordinate to and restrained by organization. The reign of the Latin mind was now drawing to an end. Between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century the European Aryans, thanks to the stimulating influence of Semite and Mongol and the rediscovery of the Greek classics, broke away from the Latin tradition and rose again to the intellectual and material leadership of mankind. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). A Short History of the World. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11870/11870-h/11870-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF THE EUROPEANS

Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, and the Garden by the Sea The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, and the Garden by the Sea § 1 The story, as Boon planned it, was to begin with a spacious Introduction. We were to tell of the profound decadence of letters at the opening of the Twentieth Century and how a movement of revival began. A few notes in pencil of this opening do exist among the Remains, and to those I have referred. He read them over to me…. “‘We begin,’” he said, “‘in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic movement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the English-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a period of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian age——’” My eye discovered a familiar binding among the flower-pots. “You have been consulting the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’” I said. He admitted it without embarrassment. “I have prigged the whole thing from the last Victorian Edition—with some slight variations…. ‘The Giants of the Victorian age had passed. Men looked in vain for their successors. For a time there was an evident effort to fill the vacant thrones; for a time it seemed that the unstinted exertions of Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the friends of Mr. Stephen Phillips might go some way towards obliterating these magnificent gaps. And then, slowly but surely, it crept into men’s minds that the game was up——’” “You will alter that phrase?” I said. “Certainly. But it must serve now … ‘that, humanly speaking, it was impossible that anything, at once so large, so copious, so broadly and unhesitatingly popular, so nobly cumulative as the Great Victorian Reputations could ever exist again. The Race seemed threatened with intellectual barrenness; it had dropped its great blossoms, and stood amidst the pile of their wilting but still showy petals, budless and bare. It is curious to recall the public utterances upon literature that distinguished this desolate and melancholy time. It is a chorus of despair. There is in the comments of such admirable but ageing critics as still survived, of Mr. Gosse, for example, and the venerable Sir Sidney Colvin and Mr. Mumchance, an inevitable suggestion of widowhood; the judges, bishops, statesmen who are called to speak upon literature speak in the same reminiscent, inconsolable note as of a thing that is dead. Year after year one finds the speakers at the Dinner of the Royal Literary Fund admitting the impudence of their appeal. I remember at one of these festivities hearing the voice of Mr. Justice Gummidge break…. The strain, it is needless to say, found its echo in Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole; he confessed he never read anything that is less than thirty years old with the slightest enjoyment, and threw out the suggestion that nothing new should be published—at least for a considerable time—unless it was clearly shown to be posthumous…. “‘Except for a few irresistible volumes of facetiousness, the reading public very obediently followed the indications of authority in these matters, just as it had followed authority and sustained the Giants in the great Victorian days. It bought the long-neglected classics—anything was adjudged a classic that was out of copyright—it did its best to read them, to find a rare smack in their faded allusions, an immediate application for their forgotten topics. It made believe that architects were still like Mr. Pecksniff and schoolmasters like Squeers, that there were no different women from Jane Austen’s women, and that social wisdom ended in Ruskin’s fine disorder. But with the decay, of any intellectual observation of the present these past things had lost their vitality. A few resolute people maintained an artificial interest in them by participation in quotation-hunting competitions and the like, but the great bulk of the educated classes ceased presently to read anything whatever. The classics were still bought by habit, as people who have lost faith will still go to church; but it is only necessary to examine some surviving volume of this period to mark the coruscation of printer’s errors, the sheets bound in upside down or accidentally not inked in printing or transferred from some sister classic in the same series, to realize that these volumes were mere receipts for the tribute paid by the pockets of stupidity to the ancient prestige of thought…. “‘An air of completion rested upon the whole world of letters. A movement led by Professor Armstrong, the eminent educationist, had even gone some way towards banishing books from the schoolroom—their last refuge. People went about in the newly invented automobile and played open-air games; they diverted what attention they had once given to their minds to the more rational treatment of their stomachs. Reading became the last resort of those too sluggish or too poor to play games; one had recourse to it as a substitute for the ashes of more strenuous times in the earlier weeks of mourning for a near relative, and even the sale of classics began at last to decline. An altogether more satisfying and alluring occupation for the human intelligence was found in the game of Bridge. This was presently improved into Auction Bridge. Preparations were made for the erection of a richly decorative memorial in London to preserve the memory of Shakespeare, an English Taj Mahal; an Academy of uncreative literature was established under the Presidency of Lord Reay (who had never written anything at all), and it seemed but the matter of a few years before the goal of a complete and final mental quiet would be attained by the whole English-speaking community….’” § 2 “You know,” I said, “that doesn’t exactly represent——” “Hush!” said Boon. “It was but a resting phase! And at this point I part company with the ‘Encyclopædia.’” “But you didn’t get all that out of the ‘Encyclopædia’?” “Practically—yes. I may have rearranged it a little. The Encyclopædist is a most interesting and representative person. He takes up an almost eighteenth-century attitude, holds out hopes of a revival of Taste under an Academy, declares the interest of the great mass of men in literature is always ’empirical,’ regards the great Victorian boom in letters as quite abnormal, and seems to ignore what you would call that necessary element of vitalizing thought…. It’s just here that Hallery will have to dispute with him. We shall have to bring them together in our book somehow…. Into this impressive scene of decline and the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic Hallery of ours, reciting with passionate conviction, ‘the thought of a nation is the life of a nation.’ You see our leading effect?” He paused. “We have to represent Hallery as a voice crying in the wilderness. We have to present him in a scene of infinite intellectual bleakness, with the thinnest scrub of second-rate books growing contemptibly, and patches of what the Encyclopædist calls tares—wind-wilted tares—about him. A mournful Encyclopædist like some lone bird circling in the empty air beneath the fading stars…. Well, something of that effect, anyhow! And then, you know, suddenly, mysteriously one grows aware of light, of something coming, of something definitely coming, of the dawn of a great Literary Revival….” “How does it come?” “Oh! In the promiscuous way of these things. The swing of the pendulum, it may be. Some eminent person gets bored at the prospect of repeating that rigmarole about the great Victorians and our present slackness for all the rest of his life, and takes a leaf from one of Hallery’s books. We might have something after the fashion of the Efficiency and Wake-up-England affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl at dawn?” “I’ve heard them at twilight. They say, ‘Come back. Come back.’ But what has that to do with——” “Nothing. There’s a movement, a stir, a twittering, and then a sudden promiscuous uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in the newspapers, paragraphs, letters, associations, societies, leagues. I imagine a very great personality indeed in the most extraordinary and unexpected way coming in….” (It was one of Boon’s less amiable habits to impute strange and uncanny enterprises, the sudden adoption of movements, manias, propagandas, adhesion to vegetarianism, socialism, the strangest eccentricities, to the British royal family.) “As a result Hallery finds himself perforce a person of importance. ‘The thought of a nation is the life of a nation,’ one hears it from royal lips; ‘a literature, a living soul, adequate to this vast empire,’ turns up in the speech of a statesman of the greatest literary pretensions. Arnold White responds to the new note. The Daily Express starts a Literary Revival on its magazine page and offers a prize. The Times follows suit. Reports of what is afoot reach social circles in New York…. The illumination passes with a dawnlike swiftness right across the broad expanse of British life, east and west flash together; the ladies’ papers and the motoring journals devote whole pages to ‘New Literature,’ and there is an enormous revival of Book Teas…. That sort of thing, you know—extensively.” § 3 “So much by way of prelude. Now picture to yourself the immediate setting of my conference. Just hand me that book by the ‘Encyclopædia.’” It was Mallock’s “New Republic.” He took it, turned a page or so, stuck a finger in it, and resumed. “It is in a narrow, ill-kept road by the seaside, Bliss. A long wall, plaster-faced, blotched and peeling, crested with uncivil glass against the lower orders, is pierced by cast-iron gates clumsily classical, and through the iron bars of these there is visible the deserted gatekeeper’s lodge, its cracked windows opaque with immemorial dirt, and a rich undergrowth of nettles beneath the rusty cypresses and stone-pines that border the carriage-way. An automobile throbs in the road; its occupants regard a board leaning all askew above the parapet, and hesitate to descend. On the board, which has been enriched by the attentions of the passing boy with innumerable radiant mud pellets, one reads with difficulty— “‘This be it, my dear Archer,’ says one of the occupants of the motor-car, and he rises, throws aside his furs, and reveals—the urbane presence of the Encyclopædist. He descends, and rings a clangorous bell…. Eh?” must “It’s the garden of the ‘New Republic’?” “Exactly. Revisited. It’s an astonishing thing. Do you know the date of the ‘New Republic’? The book’s nearly forty years old! About the time of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Friendship’s Garland,’ and since that time there’s been nothing like a systematic stocktaking of the English-speaking mind—until the Encyclopædist reported ‘no effects.’ And I propose to make this little party in the motor-car a sort of scratch expedition, under the impetus of the proposed Revival of Thought. They are prospecting for a Summer Congress, which is to go into the state of the republic of letters thoroughly. It isn’t perhaps quite Gosse’s style, but he has to be there—in a way he’s the official British man of letters—but we shall do what we can for him, we shall make him show a strong disposition towards protective ironies and confess himself not a little bothered at being dragged into the horrid business. And I think we must have George Moore, who has played uncle to so many movements and been so uniformly disappointed in his nephews. And William Archer, with that face of his which is so exactly like his mind, a remarkably fine face mysteriously marred by an expression of unscrupulous integrity. And lastly, Keyhole.” “Why Keyhole?” I asked. “Hallery has to murder some one. I’ve planned that—and who he murder but Keyhole?… And we have to hold the first meeting in Mallock’s garden to preserve the continuity of English thought. would “Very well! Then we invent a morose, elderly caretaker, greatly embittered at this irruption. He parleys for a time through the gate with all the loyalty of his class, mentions a number of discouraging defects, more particularly in the drainage, alleges the whole place is clammy, and only at Gosse’s clearly enunciated determination to enter produces the key.” Boon consulted his text. “Naturally one would give a chapter to the Villa by the Sea and Mallock generally. Our visitors explore. They visit one scene after another familiar to the good Mallockite; they descend ‘the broad flights of steps flanked by Gods and Goddesses’ that lead from one to another of the ‘long, straight terraces set with vases and Irish yews,’ and the yews, you know, have suffered from the want of water, the vases are empty, and ivy, under the benediction of our modest climate, has already veiled the classical freedom—the conscientious nudity, one might say—of the statuary. The laurels have either grown inordinately or perished, and the ‘busts of orators, poets, and philosophers’ ‘with Latin inscriptions,’ stand either bleakly exposed or else swallowed up, in a thicket. There is a pleasing struggle to translate the legends, and one gathers scholarship is not extinct in England. “The one oasis in a universal weediness is the pond about the ‘scaly Triton,’ which has been devoted to the culture of spring onions, a vegetable to which the aged custodian quite superfluously avows himself very ‘partial.’ The visitors return to the house, walk along its terrace, survey its shuttered front, and they spend some time going through its musty rooms. Dr. Keyhole distinguishes himself by the feverish eagerness of his curiosity about where Leslie slept and where was the boudoir of Mrs. Sinclair. He insists that a very sad and painful scandal about these two underlies the New Republic, and professes a thirsty desire to draw a veil over it as conspicuously as possible. The others drag him away to the summer dining-room, now a great brier tangle, where once Lady Grace so pleasantly dined her guests. The little arena about the fountain in a porphyry basin they do not find, but the garden study they peer into, and see its inkpot in the shape of a classical temple, just as Mr. Mallock has described it, and the windowless theatre, and, in addition, they find a small private gas-works that served it. The old man lets them in, and by the light of uplifted vestas they see the decaying, rat-disordered ruins of the scene before which Jenkinson who was Jowett, and Herbert who was Ruskin, preached. It is as like a gorge in the Indian Caucasus as need be. The Brocken act-drop above hangs low enough to show the toes of the young witch, still brightly pink…. “They go down to the beach, and the old man, with evil chuckles, recalls a hitherto unpublished anecdote of mixed bathing in the ’seventies, in which Mrs. Sinclair and a flushed and startled Dr. Jenkinson, Greek in thought rather than action, play the chief parts, and then they wade through a nettle-bed to that ‘small classical portico’ which leads to the locked enclosure containing the three tombs, with effigies after the fashion of Genoa Cemetery. But the key of the gate is lost, so that they cannot go in to examine them, and the weeds have hidden the figures altogether. “‘That’s a pity,’ some one remarks, ‘for it’s here, no doubt, that old Laurence lies, with his first mistress and his last—under these cypresses.’ “The aged custodian makes a derisive noise, and every one turns to him. “‘I gather you throw some doubt?’ the Encyclopædist begins in his urbane way. “‘Buried—under the cypresses—first mistress and last!’ The old man makes his manner invincibly suggestive of scornful merriment. “‘But isn’t it so?’ “‘Bless y’r ’art, ! Mr. Laurence—buried! Mr. Laurence worn’t never alive!’ no “‘But there was a Mr. Laurence?’ young “‘That was Mr. Mallup ’imself, that was! ’E was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup, and sometimes ’e went about pretendin’ to be Mr. Laurence and sometimes he was Mr. Leslie, and sometimes——But there, you’d ’ardly believe. ’E got all this up—cypresses, chumes, everythink—out of ’is ’ed. Po’try. Why! ’Ere! Jest come along ’ere, gents!’ “He leads the way along a narrow privet alley that winds its surreptitious way towards an alcove. “‘Miss Merton,’ he says, flinging the door of this open. “‘The Roman Catholic young person?’ says Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole. “‘Quite right, sir,’ says the aged custodian. “They peer in. “Hanging from a peg the four visitors behold a pale blue dress cut in the fashion of the ’seventies, a copious ‘chignon’ of fair hair, large earrings, and on the marble bench a pair of open-work stockings and other articles of feminine apparel. A tall mirror hangs opposite these garments, and in a little recess convenient to the hand are the dusty and decaying materials for a hasty ‘make-up.’ “The old custodian watches the effect of this display upon the others with masked enjoyment. “‘You mean Miss Merton ?’ said the Encyclopædist, knitting his brows. painted “‘Mr. Mallup did,’ says the aged custodian. “‘You mean——?’ “‘Mr. Mallup was Miss Merton. ’E got up too. Parst ’er orf as a young lady, ’e did. Oh, ’e was a great mistifier was Mr. Mallup. None of the three of ’em wasn’t real people, really; he got ’em all up.’ ’er “‘She had sad-looking eyes, a delicate, proud mouth, and a worn, melancholy look,’ muses Mr. Archer. “‘And young Laurence was in love with her,’ adds the Encyclopædist…. “‘They was all Mr. Mallup,’ says the aged custodian. ‘Made up out of ’is ’ed. And the gents that pretended they was Mr. ’Uxley and Mr. Tyndall in disguise, one was Bill Smithers, the chemist’s assistant, and the other was the chap that used to write and print the Margate Advertiser before the noo papers come.’” About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h/34962-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

The Great Slump, the Revival of Letters, and the Garden by the Sea

Requests are undeniably unmissable for anyone willing to start in the Python ecosystem. Yet, the community is broadly unaware of how sad the situation has become. The Incident Due to dramatic circumstances, it was partially locked and put in "maintenance mode" only, meaning it would no longer evolve (features speaking). Some of you may have heard that more than six years ago, Requests was working toward a major version, namely the V3. There was even r with a substantial amount, around $30k. a completed fundraise At the time, there was a plan to bring Async and HTTP/2 support (most notably). You'll guess that none of the exposed promises ever landed. Impacts This incident led to several impacts. Maintainers felt too much pressure to make steps toward a major; some of them said: . "We just can't deliver the promises, and it's going hard to explain why" All the back pressure landed at urllib3. Abruptly started to refuse any changes, saying: "Requests is feature complete, and it's popularity makes it nearly impossible to fix bugs that may be considered feature to this point." Newer projects started ditching HTTP client Requests by learning to use a new one. Some large-scale projects bound to Requests did not migrate because of the potentially high cost of doing it. Let's be clear, this article is not about saying "Requests maintainers are bad" but rather saying we don't agree, and everyone is entitled to their choices. For many years now, Requests have been frozen. Being left in a vegetative state and not evolving, from using more advanced features. this blocked millions of developers The Journey Into Waking Up Initially, like many other reasonable people, I said to myself "Let's wait, Requests will eventually unblock the situation!" Yet, the years are still passing, and nothing. Let's realize something, Yet, Requests is unable to do so. Internet Explorer 11 just celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, and you’ll never guess that it has support for HTTP/2 integrated! I said to myself: "Why are we waiting for this indefinitely? They don't owe us anything! There's a reasonable chance we are waiting... trapped in a circular reference… Let's act." Then, I tried to get a firm grip on the urllib3 base code, contributing and until I was ready to kick things up with that would have put urllib3 far ahead. Without any breaking changes. I was delusional. This was a bit of a shock, but six months passed between my initial kick-off and , and here's why in a nutshell: this there a proof of concept my formal give-up Every bit of idea brought to the table was dismissed, and never seriously analyzed. This felt as good as taking the coldest wind on your face while exiting your warm home. It's the hard truth of the OSS; it's not a democracy, and it's not ruled by pure logic, but by humans. Not far later on, urllib3 called out to help with HTTP/2 support (only) and claimed around $40k to be able to deliver. They probably meant well, but[...] a fundraiser This was the last straw for me, knowing the past mistakes, and actually the best incentive to break the cycle. Everything points to another year before having the slightest sign of a into our production pipes. They clearly lack the time to move forward (or incentives? or both?). No worries, as developers, we should share this burden for the greater good. PRI * HTTP/2.0\r\n\r\nSM\r\n\r\n From my perspective (my opinion only), the OSS ecosystem should not fundraise money for a decade-old protocol, and most of the time should deliver prior to asking. Entities raising money with no solid proof of concept; that's rare! This felt like a bit of a hostage situation, but it could only be me seeing it this way. The Solution So many years and various expertise have been brought to Requests and urllib3… Do we throw all of it into the garbage disposal? Engineers should be reasonable scientists and not revisionists. We don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again; HTTP client Requests are established and really pleasant in their usage. We believe that Requests has the most inclusive and developer-friendly interfaces. So, how to propose an attractive continuity for Requests? How hard could this be to (i) bring a true upgrade experience and (ii) keep the compatibility as high as possible? Sometimes, the OSS ecosystem acts like it is trying to land a rover on the Moon, let's be more realistic and bring our vision down to firm ground. There's a chance offered to us to rehabilitate Requests (and urllib3) and give a fresh breath of air to us, the developers. Without having to learn something as basic as handling an HTTP client. So, the work started, without looking back. Just around my intent to give up on urllib3 evolution, we proposed a fork of both urllib3 and Requests, namely and . urllib3-future Niquests They are (truly) drop-in replacements, at the time of writing, those forks are six months old! And the whole work around this is roughly a year old. We listened to what the community needed by... triaging all the issues on major repositories (Requests, urllib3, and dependants of them) so that the upgrade would be truly useful. Are you seeing it coming? Great! against ! Let's look at the feature table comparison requests, httpx, and aiohttp Feature niquests requests httpx aiohttp HTTP/1.1 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ HTTP/2 ✅ ❌ ✅ ❌ HTTP/3 over QUIC ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ Synchronous ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ Asynchronous ✅ ❌ ✅ ✅ Thread Safe ✅ ✅ ❌ N/A Task Safe ✅ N/A ✅ ✅ OS Trust Store ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ Multiplexing ✅ ❌ Limited ❌ DNSSEC ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ Customizable DNS Resolution ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ DNS over HTTPS ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ DNS over QUIC ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ DNS over TLS ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ Multiple DNS Resolver ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ Network Fine Tuning & Inspect ✅ ❌ Limited Limited Certificate Revocation Protection ✅ ❌ ❌ ❌ Session Persistence ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ In-memory Certificate CA & mTLS ✅ ❌ Limited Limited SOCKS 4/5 Proxies ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌ HTTP/HTTPS Proxies ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ TLS-in-TLS Support ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ Direct HTTP/3 Negotiation ✅ N/A N/A N/A Happy Eyeballs ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ Package / SLSA Signed ✅ ❌ ❌ ✅ And you would think... performance..? are bad? against ! Look at the performance comparison them Fetch a thousand requests using 10 tasks or threads, each with a hundred requests using a single pool of 10 connection. Scenario: High-Level APIs Client Average Delay to Complete Notes requests 987 ms ThreadPoolExecutor. HTTP/1.1 httpx 735 ms Asyncio. HTTP/2 niquests 470 ms Asyncio. HTTP/2 Simplified APIs Client Average Delay to Complete Notes requests core 643 ms ThreadPoolExecutor. HTTP/1.1 httpx core 550 ms Asyncio. HTTP/2 aiohttp 220 ms Asyncio. HTTP/1.1 niquests core 210 ms Asyncio. HTTP/2 Did you give up on HTTP/2 due to performance concerns? Think again! open up a wide range of possibilities! Multiplexing and response laziness And everything you are witnessing is in fact "Requests"-extended, and you have nothing to learn again to get started. We kept 98% of the test cases from both Requests and urllib3, then extended them to cover newer features. We are looking forward to seeing you at the Niquests repository! Let's say it's a promotional offer, get everything and more for $̶4̶0̶k̶  $0! #1 You depend on Requests? Discover instead. Niquests Drop-in replacement, simple patch needed, tiny effort required. #2 You depend on urllib3? Discover instead. urllib3.future Drop-in replacement, no patch required, atom-like sized effort required. By visiting the GitHub repository and documentation, you will be able to learn more about this, and hopefully make a decisive switch!

The Promise That Was Made Six Years Ago for Requests 3 Is Revived

The NFT world has made millions for lots of investors, while at the same time, it has bankrupted just as many people. There are rumors that NFTs will make a big comeback in 2024 and grab the headlines again. But is that really true? Can we trust these rumors? To find out, we will return to the very beginning - to the peak of NFTs in 2021, we will try to understand the reasons for the collapse of the market in 2022, its gradual recovery in 2023, and give a forecast for the current year. Main Takes: : NFTs experienced a significant surge in 2021, with trading volumes reaching $17.6 billion, driven by unique blockchain technology, the crypto bull run, the COVID-19 pandemic, the decline in ICOs, network effects, and FOMO. 2021 Historical Context : A dramatic correction occurred in 2022, with trading volumes and NFT prices plummeting due to a broader crypto market downturn, highlighted by events such as the collapse of TerraUSD and the bankruptcy of major crypto players. 2022 Market Correction : Despite a sluggish start, the NFT market showed signs of revival in the last quarter of 2023, buoyed by a bullish crypto market and the SEC's approval of Bitcoin ETFs, with weekly trading volumes surpassing $500 million in December. 2023 Revival Signs : The introduction of Bitcoin Ordinals and the growth of Solana contributed to the renewed interest in NFTs, offering unique features and security advantages. Bitcoin Ordinals and Solana's Influence : Positive expectations for the NFT market are supported by a more mature and diverse sector, the broader crypto market's performance, utility in various niches, and mainstream adoption by traditional brands. However, challenges such as wash trading, scams, and regulatory fragmentation remain. 2024 Outlook Why there was an NFT boom in 2021? In 2021, the NFT market experienced an unprecedented surge. At that time, many thought that the interest in non-fungible tokens was confined to a relatively closed group of traders who had little connection to the art world. Soon, auction houses began to offer more NFT sales and create infrastructure and consistent offerings of this kind. Research shows an explosion of interest in NFTs as a new asset class, with sales reaching in 2021. Famous NFTs, like the ones from Beeple, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and CryptoPunks, became iconic. Even big brands like Gucci and D&G joined in, making their own collectibles. $17.6 billion In 2022, the NFT market faced a serious disruption, leaving everyone reeling. The once bustling market took a nosedive in prices, sparking widespread concerns and discussions about its future. NFT crash in 2022 In June 2022, we witnessed a 12-month low. Sales fell to 1 billion dollars, the worst market performance since June 2021 (when sales were a modest 648 million dollars). According to , while the market was worth 3 trillion dollars in November 2021, it's now sporting less than 1 trillion dollars. Chainanalisys In the second quarter of 2022, things took a turn for the worse. The , laid out by the Non-Fungible, reveals that sales volume has decreased by 20.05% from the first quarter of 2022, from 12,639,781 to 10,105,967. The number of sellers has decreased by 35.88% and the number of buyers has decreased by 25.41%. market report for Q2 This data suggested that collectors weren't exactly interested in taking big risks when it came to investing in new and upcoming projects appearing on NFT platforms. They've decided to trade on the secondary market, where prices remained higher. NFTs at one time depreciated by millions of percent, almost to several hundred, having been purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Take Logan Paul, for example. His Azuki NFT, once purchased for a whopping $623,000, is now worth $10. Likewise, Steve Aoki's Doodles NFT has seen its value drop to less than $42,000. Even the stars aren't immune to the NFT tragedy. Snoop Dogg also lost more than $300,000 on CryptoPunk, bought for $1.1 million, which is now worth about $688,000. However, the most popular loss is Justin Bieber's journey with the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project. What started as a $1.31 million investment turned into a shocking $59,090. The NFT market has plummeted in 2022, thanks to several factors including market oversaturation, scams, and the collapse of big systems. With a flood of NFT projects and the art of deception on the rise, investor hesitation contributed to the market downturn. First factor. Market oversaturation Before the NFT boom of 2021, the market was relatively niche, with just a handful of NFT projects grabbing attention. But when the hype hit its peak, it felt like everyone wanted a piece of the action. The result? An overwhelming deluge of NFT projects flooding the market.** Second factor. Deception and scams Where large sums of money start circulating, fraudsers immediately appear, eager to profit from it. The NFT market hasn`t been an exception. As interest in NFTs has grown, so had the number of fraudulent activities and scams targeting unsuspecting investors. Hackers and scammers have seized upon the NFT boom, deceiving people and causing them to part with their assets. Discord breaches, malicious links, and the whole range of free NFT coin scams left many people with heavy losses and undermined confidence in the market. Third factor. The collapse of big systems When FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, filed for bankruptcy, allegedly due to a liquidity shortage and a disappearing act with the funds. Additionally, the Terra blockchain cryptocurrencies, TerraUSD and LUNA, have seen catastrophic drops in value, leaving investors reeling from significant losses. In any ecosystem, when a big player fails, it can send shakes through the whole system. In the case of the NFT market crash, the collapse of important systems associated with Web3 contributed to the downturn. What happened with the NFT market in 2023? Despite the NFT market crashing in 2022, experts and enthusiasts are pretty sure that NFTs will bounce back to their best state. Even though there was a big drop in trading in June, the NFT market overall stayed strong in the first half of the year. The beginning of 2023 looked good for NFTs, with a sudden increase in trading activity. The launch of trading platforms like LooksRare and X2Y2 played a big part, along with the rewards they offered for trading. NFT sales in 2023 reached around $17.7 billion, similar to the sales recorded in 2021. This is also almost a 10-fold increase compared to the same period last year. Taking a closer look at the main factors, a pretty stable first half of the year was helped by a healthy growth in the number of unique buyers and transactions. But this was balanced out by a drop in the average sale price. Even if we ignore the less valuable and less important projects, most collections nowadays aren't really worth much. Out of the 8,850 collections leading in market value, 18% are not worth anything, and 41% are being sold for prices between $5 and $100. Less than 1% have a price higher than $6,000 – a far cry from the usual million-dollar deals made two years ago. Despite this, the NFT community's stability, combined with ongoing innovations in this area, is paving the way for a potential comeback. Thanks to forward-thinking NFT creators and big brands using this technology, the next bullish rise of NFTs looks promising. Yuga Labs' Role in the NFT Comeback Yuga Labs' groundbreaking games, like Dookey Dash, brought in new collectors and created a fresh wave of excitement in the NFT space. Thanks to these innovative Yuga Labs projects, they became the driving force behind the NFT comeback. Their contribution to a whopping 30% of all Ethereum NFT trades in just one month made them a beacon of hope for the NFT market. As we move forward, their impact will inevitably determine the course of NFTs for many years to come. NFT brands are selling stuff in big regular and online stores. We are seeing the launch of major blockchain-based games. And more big companies are joining the NFT world. As a result, NFT-based brand building could be a significant factor beyond just the recovery but also surpass previous heights in 2024. Will NFTs be reborn in 2024? The NFT market is expected to change a lot in 2024. Despite the prolonged decline and negative background, it's predicted that the NFT market will make around in revenue in 2024. $2,378.0 million In 2024, the NFT market is expected to go through big changes with lots of new trends. Here are some of the important trends. Metaverses The global Metaverse market size is steadily at the expected rate, recording a CAGR of 47.2% from 2023 to 2027. The cost of the metaverse industry will increase from $61.8 billion in 2022 to approximately $426.9 billion by the end of 2027. expected to grow The Metaverse NFT market is huge and includes a variety of digital assets such, as virtual houses, avatars, art, and even virtual fashion. Many things are making this market grow, like more people using blockchain, games, and virtual worlds becoming popular, and the growing demand for unique and scarce digital assets. Additionally, the Metaverse NFT market gives creators, artists, and gamers new chances to make money from their digital creations, and investors can diversify their portfolios by investing in these unique assets. NFT Aggregators In 2022-2023, saw the rise of NFT aggregators. These platforms let traders buy and sell NFTs from different marketplaces, all in one place. Top aggregators Gem and Genie showed impressive growth: this year, the trading volume went over 511,000 ETH. That's about 21 times more than in 2021. NFT aggregators also have extra benefits. They let traders complete whole collections by buying lots of NFTs at the lowest prices, without needing to go to each market separately. The market share of NFT aggregators from just over 1% at the end of 2021 to about 5% today. Even though the market share of NFT aggregators is still not very big, recent purchases of and Genie by Uniswap show strong interest from existing players in NFT aggregators. It confirms that NFT aggregators seem ready to play a big role in shaping the NFT trading scene for the long term. has also grown Gem by OpenSea Entering the era of Web3, the NFT world holds promises of growth, creativity, and financial opportunities. Will NFTs make a big comeback in 2024? It seems like Metaverse and NFT aggregators are ready to contribute significantly to the upcoming success.

Is the Revival of NFTs in 2024 a Reality, or Just Another Fairy Tale for Beginners?

If you’ve never played the famous , raise your hand! Snake game I say that, but I suppose that nowadays, the new generation may never have heard of this game, which may seem a bit old-fashioned given the possibilities offered by today’s computers and the Web. And yet, there was a time when the Snake game was a game that all cell phone owners spent an inordinate amount of time playing. Yes, back then, we weren’t talking about smartphones, just telephones. It was a good time, as the saying goes, and Nokia popularized the game through its mobile devices, which were also a benchmark. Today, not much remains of Nokia’s domination of the mobile world and the Snake game. For those who are nostalgic for this game – and I’m one of them, I must admit – this tutorial will teach you how to recreate it for the Web. To do so, I’ll be using HTML5’s Canvas API and JavaScript. It’s also an opportunity to learn how to use classes in Javascript and to create an effective game loop for Web games. Creating the Web page for our Snake game To begin with, we’re going to create the Web page that will enable us to play the Snake game we’ll be developing in this tutorial. You’ll soon see that this Web page presents no difficulties whatsoever. Two divs, one for the page title and another to display the area where the snake will move. To this, I’ll add a little to center these divs by applying a fixed width to them: CSS https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/52d2a7ffd8b417fb48e27ae86237487f?embedable=true Design of the Snake class As I explained in the introduction to this tutorial, I’m going to use a dedicated Snake class to model the game. This will also allow you to discover how to manipulate classes in JavaScript. Our Snake will have the following properties: and to represent board size in width and height respectively. bw bh and represent the number of cells available for the board. nbx nby and to represent the size of a snake element in width and height. eltw elth and which represent the snake’s displacement vector. dirx diry and add a small margin to the width and height of snake elements so that the player can see the demarcation between each snake element. marginx marginy , , , which store the state of the moving arrows at a given moment. keyup keydown keyleft keyright stores the number of frames per second required to move the snake at the start of the game. startftps At the end of the constructor, an init method is called to initialize the snake at the start of the game. When a new game is to be started, simply call this init method again. This gives us the following code for our Snake class: https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/719918967c6bc4d5a0bde7252fdfc617?embedable=true In the init method, you can define other snake properties, such as a pointer to its head and a pointer to its tail. The elements array will store all the snake’s elements at a given moment. The points property is used to store points for the current game, while the level property is used to define how many points are accumulated to increase the game’s fps. The higher the number of fps, the faster the snake will move. Since the fps property represents the number of frames per second, we need to have a fpsinterval property valued at the result of dividing 1 second (or 1,000 milliseconds) by the desired number of fps. The principle of the Snake game The principle of the Snake game is simple: you have to guide the snake using the four directional arrows so that it eats the maximum number of apples that appear on the board. Each time you eat an apple, the snake grows by one element. As the snake grows, you’ll find it difficult to avoid touching its own tail. If you don’t, you’ll lose, and the score will start again from zero. Of course, every time you eat an apple, you score a point. It’s worth pointing out that the version of Snake we’re going to implement is the one where touching the edges of the board doesn’t make you lose. It just makes you tip over to the opposite side. The second versions of the Snake game were implemented in this way by Nokia. Since the snake has to eat an apple, we need to display this apple on the board in a random fashion, taking care not to generate an apple directly on an element of the snake. This gives us the following generatefood method for our Snake class: https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/01123c58385dfb7b2a43ca4d186eb0fd?embedable=true Snake on-screen rendering Our Snake class is progressing, and we now need to create a method for rendering the snake on the screen. We’ll also need to display the player’s number of points at a given time and, finally, display the apple to be eaten. The apple’s position is stored in the Snake class’s food property. To render the Snake on the screen, I’m using HTML5’s Canvas API. I’ll use this API’s drawing primitives to draw rectangles representing the various elements of the snake as well as the apple to be eaten. I’ll apply a different color to the apple and the snake so that the player can distinguish between them. This gives the following code for the draw method of our Snake class: https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/a1381047c4849f76f38a99db5730231d?embedable=true Moving the Snake We now have a snake that we can display on screen. This is all very well, but we need to add support for the snake’s movement. As explained above, the snake moves along the coordinate vector (dirx, diry). So, each time we call the move method I’m going to define here, the snake will move by the same amount. In this move method, we check that the coordinates of the snake’s head correspond to those of the apple to be eaten. If so, the snake has just eaten the apple. The player scores a point, but more importantly, we need to take four actions: Add an element to the snake’s elements. This element becomes the new tail. Generate a new apple by calling generatefood. Add a point to the player. If the player passes a level, then we update the number of frames per second to be displayed to speed up the Snake’s movement. Still, in the move method, we need to check that the player hasn’t made the mistake of touching an element of the snake with the head. If this is the case, the game is lost, and we start afresh! To do this, we call the init method of the Snake class presented above. Now, we need to complete the move method by actually moving the snake. To do this, we add dirx and diry to the snake’s head coordinates. This gives us a new head to add. You’ll also notice that moving the snake is done intelligently by removing the tail each time and adding a new head. This avoids having to update the position of all the snake’s elements. Finish by remembering to update the new head. Incidentally, you’ll also have noticed that when the snake’s head crosses a board boundary, we make it move to the opposite side of the board. This applies to both width and length. This gives us the following code for the move method: https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/857a654c2b6dd065a15bfdb5751cdcab?embedable=true The GameLoop of our Snake Game Our Snake can be displayed on screen. Our Snake can be moved by calling its move method. What are we missing? We’re missing the implementation of our game’s GameLoop! Without this GameLoop, which will call the move and draw methods at regular intervals, the Snake won’t be able to move. In what follows, we’ll show you how to implement a GameLoop the right way in JavaScript, leaving it up to the browser to call it when it sees fit so as not to block the rendering thread of the game’s web page. To do this, we’ll use the requestAnimationFrame method of the standard JavaScript object window. The browser will then adapt the maximum fps it can support to the computer or smartphone on which the web page will be used. Within our gameloop method, we’ll then decorrelate the number of fps supported by the browser from the number of fps we want to move our snake. We’ll only call the move and draw methods when we’re within the fps range defined earlier. It’s important to update the coordinates of the snake’s movement vector according to the state of the four directional keys: up, down, left, and right. Finally, we call the GameLoop, delegating to the browser the task of choosing the best moment to do so. This gives us the following code for the GameLoop: https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/ef5abcd238e63cacd906a039b7647eaf?embedable=true Handling user interaction with the Snake To enable the Snake to be moved according to the directional keys pressed by the player, we use the keydown and keyup events. For each of these events, we’ll call a method of the Snake class. Logically, this will be pressdown for the keydown event and pressup for the keyup event. We update the value of the linked Snake class properties according to what the player does with these keys. As you can see, we don’t block the game by updating the snake’s position directly. Instead, we update the state in the gameloop method, which is called at regular intervals. Assembling the various Snake components To complete this Snake game, we need to assemble the various elements. We retrieve the Canvas object via its ID. Then, we obtain the 2D context linked to this Canvas. Apply the desired dimensions. We create a Snake object, passing the various expected values as parameters, including the number of cells on the board. Add the event listeners for the keydown and keyup events. Finally, all that’s left to do is call our Snake’s gameloop once to start the game. This gives us the following complete code for the famous Snake game made with the Canvas API and the infernal HTML5/JavaScript Web couple: https://gist.github.com/ssaurel/e01731169b9f0dca1a3fb19ba6e8f3a2?embedable=true Our Snake Game in Action Our Snake complete, it’s time to test it in a Web browser to see if the Snake magic works again, as it did when Nokia outrageously dominated the mobile world: From this Snake game, you can imagine several possible enhancements. For example, you could add a sound each time the snake eats the apple. You could use HTML5’s Web Storage API to store a player’s local high score. This way, when a player beats his high score, you can display a congratulatory message. The possibilities are endless, and your only limit, as ever in programming, is your imagination. Watch this tutorial on YouTube This tutorial can also be watched on YouTube on the SSaurel channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uSfTEq2JMo&embedable=true Also published . here

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