![]() and he was just a few days past his nineteenth birthday when he stepped aboard the Pilgrim clad in the duck trousers, checked shirt, and tarpaulin hat of an ordinary seaman. The young man's name was Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Yet the pen of a Harvard undergraduate who served on board the Pilgrim and the Alert as a common sailor was to rescue these two ships and their crews from the oblivion that swallowed up all the others. A member of the Pilgrim’s crew lost overboard on the outward trip, two sailors flogged by choleric Captain Thompson in California waters, some foul weather off Cape Horn in another ship, the Alert, to which Pilgrim transferred her cargo of hides for the voyage home-these hardly seem the stuff out of which to make a literary masterpiece. The voyage itself, curiously enough, was no more eventful than a hundred others to Spanish California by New England ships in quest of cheap leather for the shoe factories of Lynn and Cambridge. ![]() This brief entry in a Boston commercial newspaper is the first official record of perhaps the best-known sea journey in American history. ![]()
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