The Eagle Cliff
At the age of 16, he traveled to Canada, where he spent five years working for the Hudson's Bay Company, trading with the First Nations for furs.
The Eagle Cliff is a third-person tale that begins with the hero, a cyclist soon identified as John Barrett, who is racing through the streets of London to respond to a telegram from an old schoolmate, Bob Mabberly.
Mabberly has engaged a yacht and crew and intends to "sail, without fail" the next morning with Barrett and another schoolmate, Giles Jackman.
The next day, not long at sea, misfortune befalls the party and they collide with a passing steamer, causing their vessel to split down the middle.
When the rest of the party joins Barrett, they are happy to learn the houses there are fully functioning (with kitchens and bedrooms, each stocked appropriately).
As fate would have it, Barrett happens upon a young girl, Milly, lying on the road, who has injured her arm after falling from a cliff.
He and Milly share a love for botany, which was the cause of her fall from the cliff, and use this area of interest to pave the way for further interaction.
Together they share a love for botany and art, which Barrett spends most of his time doing, as opposed to hunting and fishing like his male counterparts.
The descriptions of the environment and their large presence in the text can most likely be attributed to Ballantyne's admitted blunder in The Coral Island regarding the coconut shell thickness and how this mistake encouraged him to visit the scenes in which his stories were told for authenticity.
[1] Through his dedication to realistically depicting the environments that he wrote about, Ballantyne takes part in the literary movement called Naturalism and is thus considered a Naturalist.
This happens to a degree in the Eagle Cliff as the main characters end up shipwrecked on an unfamiliar island and lose all of their belongings.
As mentioned, The main characters are well off financially and while their shipwreck causes them to lose their resources, they quickly regain similar luxuries on the island because the people already inhabiting it possess them.
In typical Robinsonade novels, the protagonist is abruptly isolated from civilization, oftentimes due to a shipwreck in which he/she is marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island.
After the events in the Congo, portrayed in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, there was a decline in imperialistic attitude amongst the British population.
As the book continues, it is discovered that Barrett's Intended is the daughter of the very woman he ran down earlier, providing obstacles for the budding couple.
John Rennie Short claims that Ballantyne's piety and writing style were quite attractive leading to his enormous popularity: "[his] books were aimed at the sons of the Victorian middle class.
Imbued with deep religious conviction, he felt he had a moral purpose of educating such boys into codes of honor, decency, and religiosity.
The high moral tone was redeemed by Ballantyne's ability to tell a cracking good yarn in an accessible and well-fashioned prose style.
Michelle Elleray discusses Ballantyne's overt Christianity and "his roles as a children's author to involve conveying educational information to boys in an enticing fictional format."
