R. M. Ballantyne Books Free Online: All 22, and Which Three Are Actually Good
R. M. Ballantyne wrote about a hundred adventure novels and is remembered for one, which is roughly the right ratio. But the reason to read him is more interesting than the reason to dismiss him: at sixteen he was shipped to Rupert's Land as a clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company and spent six years in the sub-Arctic, and the books drawn on those six years are first-hand in a way no other Victorian boys' novelist could manage.
Then he wrote The Coral Island about a Pacific reef he had never seen, got the coconuts wrong, was publicly corrected, and was so mortified that he spent the rest of his career doing field research before writing — living with lighthouse keepers, going down in a diving bell, riding with the London fire brigade. That embarrassment is the single most useful fact about him, because it sorts his output into two piles.
Twenty-two are free to read in the library.
The three worth your time
- The Coral Island — 1858, three boys wrecked on a Pacific reef, and the most influential book he wrote. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as a direct rebuttal and took the names Ralph and Jack straight from it; you cannot really read the one without the other. It is also, ironically, the one he researched least.
- The Young Fur Traders — his first novel, 1856, and the Rupert's Land material he actually lived. Canoe brigades, winter posts, the rhythm of a trading year. Nothing else in Victorian children's fiction is this close to the thing described. Published in his lifetime under the longer title as well, which is also in the library.
- The World of Ice — Arctic whaling, and the best writing about ice for a young reader I know of. He had been in the north and every page of the ice knows it.
The rest of the Hudson's Bay books
Read these if the fur-trade material grabbed you. They are the same territory from different angles and they are his most honest work.
- Hudson Bay — not a novel at all but his memoir of the six years, and the source the fiction draws on. Dry in places and fascinating in others.
- Ungava — sub-Arctic Quebec, a trading post established among the Inuit, and the most ethnographically careful of his books. It is also where his period's attitudes are most on display, and it wants discussing rather than handing over unaccompanied.
- The Dog Crusoe and his Master — the prairies rather than the north, and much loved by children who like a dog in a book. Perfectly good; not one of the three.
- Fast in the Ice — a short polar-exploration book, closer to journalism than fiction.
The research novels: one trade per book
After the coconut humiliation Ballantyne went to look at things, and the result is a shelf of novels that are really occupational documentaries with a plot bolted on. They are uneven as stories and genuinely good as records.
- The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands — life on a lightship, a job almost nobody wrote about. The best of this group.
- Under the Waves: Diving in Deep Waters — early hard-hat diving, described by someone who had been down in the suit.
- Post Haste — the Victorian postal service, and much more interesting than that sounds: the sorting offices, the mail trains, the sheer logistics of it.
- The Ocean and Its Wonders — straight non-fiction, oceanography for boys, and a good snapshot of what was known in 1874.
- Blown to Bits; or, The Lonely Man of Rakata — an adventure novel built on the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, written from newspaper accounts within a few years. Half disaster documentary and the strangest premise he attempted.
- In the Track of the Troops — the Russo-Turkish war, and his attempt at a war novel. It does not come off.
- Six Months at the Cape — travel writing, South Africa, and honest about being a tourist.
The gold-rush and adventure pile
Competent, formulaic, and interchangeable enough that the order does not matter.
- Digging for Gold: Adventures in California
- The Golden Dream — the same subject as a cautionary tale.
- Charlie to the Rescue
- Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader — the exception in this group, because the pirate captain is genuinely morally ambiguous rather than simply wicked. Closer to Treasure Island's shape than anything else he wrote.
- Erling the Bold — vikings, and enjoyable in a slightly ridiculous way.
The odd ones
- My Doggie and I — a London novel with almost no adventure in it, and evidence that he could write something else when he wanted to.
- Freaks on the Fells — Scottish holiday comedy. Minor and quite charming.
Where to start, and the caveat
The Coral Island, then The Young Fur Traders. If you like the second more than the first, you have found the real Ballantyne and the whole Hudson's Bay shelf is waiting.
The caveat applies to all twenty-two and is not incidental. Ballantyne is an evangelical Victorian writing about colonised places, and his books contain sermonising, casual racial hierarchy, and a settled confidence that the empire is a civilising project. He is more curious and less bloodthirsty than G. A. Henty — whose books are surveyed in G. A. Henty books by period — and that is a low bar. Read him for the ice and the canoes, and expect to stop and talk about a paragraph now and then.
More of the same shelf in books like Treasure Island, and the whole adventure collection is browsable in one place.