The Pilgrim was an early 19th century American sailing brig. She was immortalized by one of her sailors Richard Henry Dana Jr., who wrote the classic account Two Years Before the Mast about a 1834-1835 voyage between Massachusetts and California to trade for hides. Pilgrim caught fire and sank at sea in 1856.

Richard Henry Dana Jr. was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of a colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the classic American memoir Two Years Before the Mast and as an attorney who successfully represented the U.S. government before the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War in the Prize Cases. Both as a writer and as a lawyer, he was a champion of the downtrodden, from seamen to fugitive slaves and freedmen.