Title:  Martin Rattler

Author:  Robert Michael Ballantyne

Release Date:  August 25, 2004 [EBook #13290]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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MartinRattler

ByR M Ballantyne

1858

EDITOR’S NOTE

“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 a trading-clerk in the Hudson Bay Fur Company’s service when he left school, a boy of sixteen.  There, to relieve his home-sickness, he first practised his pen in long letters home to his mother.  Soon after his return 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 a chance suggestion from another publisher led to his writing his first book for boys—­“Snowflakes and Sunbeams, or The Young Fur Traders.”  That story showed he had found his vocation, and he poured forth its successors to the tune in all of some fourscore volumes.  “Martin Rattler” appeared in 1858.  In his “Personal Reminiscences” Ballantyne wrote:  “How many thousands of lads have an intense liking for the idea of a sailor’s life!” and he pointed out there the other side of the romantic picture:  the long watches “in dirty unromantic weather,” and the hard work of holystoning the decks, scraping down the masts and cleaning out the coal-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” is still one of the favourite among all his books.  Ballantyne himself was fated to die on foreign soil in 1894, at Rome, where he lies buried in the English Protestant cemetery.

The following is a list of Ballantyne’s chief romances, tales of adventure, 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 1857 and 1858 appeared, under the pseudonym of “Comus”:  “The Butterfly’s Ball and 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 Coral Island, a Tale of the Pacific Ocean” (with a preface subscribed “Ralph Rover"), 1858 (1857);