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