The Pilgrim was a small vessel, only 86 feet, for this voyage - it was an uncomfortably small vessel for a long voyage, more cramped, less stable, and shorter-handed than most Cape Horners. When it arrived on the California coast it's voyage was lengthened because the owners, Bryant and Sturgis, had decided it should collect hides for one of their larger vessels. Dana's son writes: In reading the story of this Harvard College undergraduate's experience, one should bear in mind, to appreciate the dangers of his rounding the Cape, that the brig Pilgrim was only one hundred and eighty tons burden and eighty-six feet and six inches long, shorter on the water line than many of our summer-sailing sloop and schooner yachts.
A replica of the Pilgrim He sailed for home, again as a deckhand, in the Indiaman Alert,, making the dangerous winter passage around Cape Horn, and arrived in Boston in September 1836. "Friends in Boston" had arranged for him to take passage home with the Alert if she were to leave California before the Pilgrim. His sight restored, Dana re-entered Harvard, graduated in 1837, and went on to study law. Dana produced Two years before the mast from diaries he had kept on his voyage. He wrote, he said, "to present the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is." Two years before the mast is one of the best accounts of life at sea. It contains a rare and detailed account of life on the California coast a decade before the Gold Rush revolutionized the region's culture and society. Spain had lost Mexico and it's territories in 1821 and it was with surprise that the more Spanish Royalist inclined Californios learned in 1822 that they had been, in fact, Mexicans for most of the previous year. In Two years before the mast Dana chronicles stops at the ports of Monterey, San Pedro, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Clara - very small in comparison to their size only a few years later. Dana describes the lives of sailors in the ports and their exhausting work of hide-curing on the beaches, and he gives close attention to the daily life of the peoples of California: Hispanic, Native American, and European.. He also describes the cruelty on board ships - comparing the incompetently led Pilgrim with the much more humane Alert .
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