Publisher's Synopsis
Martin Rattler is the story of a mischievous young boy with a good heart. By mistake, he winds up on the ship Firefly with his friend Barney O'Flannagan, headed to the South Seas. Escaping pirates and surviving a shipwreck, the two explore South America in one frolicking adventure after another.A thoroughly delightful read, you will follow the young adventurers as they canoe down the Amazon, narrowly escape an alligator, eat an anaconda and turtle's eggs, are captured by Indians, and then are separated. Martin escapes by jumping over a cliff and tries to make his way home. He meets some men who take him to a diamond mine where he gets a job working under a man named Baron Fagoni. But what happened to his friend Barney O'Flannagan?...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.Early lifeBallantyne 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, and Robert's uncle James Ballantyne (1772-1833) was the printer for Scottish author Sir Walter Scott.In 1832-33 the family is known to have been living at 20 Fettes Row, in the northern New Town of Edinburgh. 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). 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."
