Robert Michael Ballantyne

Robert Michael Ballantyne (24 April 1825 - 8 February 1894) was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction who wrote more than 100 books. He was also an accomplished artist, and exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy Ballantyne was born in Edinburgh on 24 April 1825, the ninth of ten children and the youngest son, to Alexander Thomson Ballantyne (1776-1847) and his wife Anne (1786-1855). Alexander was a newspaper editor and printer in the family firm of "Ballantyne & Co" based at Paul's Works on the Canongate, 2] and Robert's uncle James Ballantyne (1772-1833) was the printer for Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. 3] In 1832-33 the family is known to have been living at 20 Fettes Row, in the northern New Town of Edinburgh. 2] A UK-wide banking crisis in 1825 resulted in the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business the following year with debts of 130,000, which led to a decline in the family's fortunes. Ballantyne went to Canada aged 16, and spent five years working for the Hudson's Bay Company. He traded with the local Native Americans for furs, which required him to travel by canoe and sleigh to the areas occupied by the modern-day provinces of Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, experiences that formed the basis of his novel Snowflakes and Sunbeams (1856). 3] His longing for family and home during that period impressed him to start writing letters to his mother. Ballantyne recalled in his autobiographical Personal Reminiscences in Book Making (1893) that "To this long-letter writing I attribute whatever small amount of facility in composition I may have acquired

Martin Rattler - Boy's Adventures in the Forests of Brazil - R. M. Ballantyne - Martin Rattler is the story of a mischievous young boy with a good heart. Robert Michael Ballantyne was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction who wrote more than 100 books. He was also an accomplished artist, and exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy. "MARTIN RATTLER" was one of, Robert Michael Ballantyne's early books. Born at Edinburgh in 1825, 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