Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
1858
"MARTIN RATTLER" was one of, Robert Michael Ballantyne's early books.Born at Edinburgh in 1825,[1] he was sent to Rupert's Land as atrading-clerk in the Hudson Bay Fur Company's service when he leftschool, a boy of sixteen. There, to relieve his home-sickness, he firstpractised his pen in long letters home to his mother. Soon after hisreturn to Scotland in 1848 he published a first book on Hudson's Bay.Then he passed some years in a Scottish publisher's office; and in 1855 achance suggestion from another publisher led to his writing his firstbook for boys—"Snowflakes and Sunbeams, or The Young Fur Traders." Thatstory showed he had found his vocation, and he poured forth itssuccessors to the tune in all of some fourscore volumes. "Martin Rattler"appeared in 1858. In his "Personal Reminiscences" Ballantyne wrote: "Howmany thousands of lads have an intense liking for the idea of a sailor'slife!" and he pointed out there the other side of the romantic picture:the long watches "in dirty unromantic weather," and the hard work ofholystoning the decks, scraping down the masts and cleaning out thecoal-hole. But though his books show something of this reverse side too,there is no doubt they have helped to set many boys dreaming of
"Wrecks, buccaneers, black flags, and desert lands
On which, alone, the second Crusoe stands."
[Footnote 1: See Note to "The Coral Island" in this series.]
Among these persuasions to the life of adventure "Martin Rattler" isstill one of the favourite among all his books. Ballantyne himself wasfated to die on foreign soil in 1894, at Rome, where he lies buried inthe English Protestant cemetery.
The following is a list of Ballantyne's chief romances, tales ofadventure, and descriptive works:—
"Hudson's Bay, or Every-day Life in the Wilds of North America," etc.,1848; "Snowflakes and Sunbeams, or the Young Fur Traders," 1856. In 1857and 1858 appeared, under the pseudonym of "Comus": "The Butterfly's Balland the Grasshopper's Feast" (in verse by Roscoe), ed. with music,coloured illustrations, and a prose version; "Mister Fox"; "My Mother";"The Robber Kitten" (by the author of "Three Little Kittens"). "The CoralIsland, a Tale of the Pacific Ocean" (with a preface subscribed "RalphRover"), 1858 (1857); "Ungava, a Tale of Esquimaux Land," 1858 (1857);"Martin Rattler, or a Boy's Adventures in the Forests of Brazil," 1858;"Ships, the Great Eastern and lesser Craft" (with illustrations), 1859;"Mee-a-ow! or Good Advice to Cats and Kittens," 1859; "The World of Ice,or Adventures in the Polar Regions," 1860 (1859); "The Dog Crusoe, a Taleof the Western Prairies," 1861 (1860); "The Golden Dream, or Adventuresin the Far West," 1861 (1860); "The Gorilla Hunters, a Tale of the Wildsof Africa," 1861; "The Red Eric, or the Whaler's Last Cruise," 1861; "Manon the Ocean, a Book for Boys," 1863 (1862); "The Wild Man of the West, aTale of the Rocky Mountains," 1863 (1862); "Gascoyne, the Sandal-woodTrader, a Tale of the Pacific," 1864 (1863); "The Lifeboat, a Tale of ourCoast Heroes," 1864; "Freaks on the Fells, or Three Months' Rustication,"and "Why I did not become a Sailor," etc., 1865 (1861); "The Lighthouse,being the Story of a Great Fight between Man and the Sea," etc., 1865;"Shifting Winds, a Tough Yarn," etc., 1866; "Silver Lake, o