The boy soon realized that the sailor’s life had little of the romance that Cooper gave it, but he showed both his grit and shrewdness when with a distinct literary intention he made the most of it. He went around the world in the _Columbus_, and was discharged at Norfolk in 1848; for several years he worked in the merchant marine, visiting Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and the South Sea islands; sailing from Sag Harbor in a whaler which cruised in the Indian Ocean, he deserted at the Seychelles, and for a time supported himself as a boatman in Mauritius; and he finished his eight years at sea by a brief period with the Cape Cod fishermen. All the while he was busy collecting material for his books, losing no opportunity to share new sights and experiences, and pumping his mates for their stories. He wrote his three volumes to give a common-sense picture of a life which he believed had been unduly romanticized; and his pictures of flogging in the navy, of dysentery and cholera aboard a frigate, of the degradation of the naval discipline, of the danger and hardship met on a merchant craft, and of the intolerable monotony of whale-hunting carry out the purpose. It was good preliminary training for a reporter and editor. In 1853 he entered journalism, first on the Philadelphia _Register_ and later on the Indianapolis _Sentinel_, meanwhile writing the sea books, which gave him such a reputation that in 1853 George W. Curtis recommended him to Harper’s as an editorial worker. Bigelow in the closing days of 1860 made an arrangement with Brantz Meyer, a Baltimore writer of some reputation, to go South for $50 a week and his expenses to do special reporting. He wrote R. B. Rhett, editor of the Charleston _Mercury_, asking whether it would be safe for Meyer to attend the secession convention in Charleston, and Rhett assured him that “no agent or representative of the _Evening Post_ would be safe in coming here”; “he would certainly be tarred and feathered and made to leave the State, as the mildest possible treatment”; “he would come with his life in his hand, and would probably be hung.” Nevertheless, the _Post_ did have unsigned correspondence from Charleston and other Southern cities during the days the secession movement was ripening. When war began, Nordhoff hurriedly whipped a corps of special writers into shape. He requested Henry M. Alden, later editor of _Harper’s_ to go to the Virginia front, but Alden’s health was too precarious to permit him to face the hardships which other young literary men like E. C. Stedman were undertaking. William C. Church, a rising young journalist, who later established the _Army and Navy Journal_ and the _Galaxy_, was obtained. Philip Ripley made another of the staff, and Walter F. Williams was soon sending admirable letters from the field.