The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum invites you to step back in time when the tall ship Pilgrim visits the Santa Barbara Harbor Fri. to Sun., Aug. 25 to 27. Visitors will be welcomed aboard Pilgrim at the city pier adjacent to the museum, where they'll have the chance to discover what it was like to be a 19th-century sailor and walk the decks of Pilgrim just as Richard Henry Dana, Jr. did more than 100 years ago.

Free with museum admission, the experience will give guests a view of life aboard a hide brig, immortalized in Dana's classic seafaring novel "Two Years Before the Mast." Reservations are not needed for dockside tours. For more information, please call the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum admission store at (805) 9628404, ext. 115.

The evening prior to dockside tours, all boat owners are welcome to participate in the flotilla greeting welcoming Pilgrim to the harbor on Fri., Aug. 25. Boaters are invited to join the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum for a 5:30 p.m. departure to greet the Pilgrim for its sail into the harbor, about onehalf mile past the harbor entrance at 6 p.m.

The Pilgrim is named for the hide brig immortalized by Dana. He wrote of the Pilgrim: "The vessel I am going on is small, but strong and a remarkably fast sailer having been built for the smuggling trade."

The original Pilgrim was built in 1825 at a cost of $50,000. The purpose of its 1834 voyage was to participate in the California cattle hide trade for her Boston owners, Bryant and Sturgis. The Pilgrim set sail from Boston loaded with England's manufactured goods such as shoes, foodstuffs and ironware. When she arrived along the Alta California coast, the Pilgrim would sell or trade her New England wares, then procure hides from the missions and rancheros to be transported back to Boston. She was lost in a fire at sea in 1856.

Today's Pilgrim started her life in 1945 as a three-masted schooner plying the Baltic coastal trade out of Denmark. In 1975, she was sailed to Lisbon, Portugal, by Capt. Ray Wallace, the noted marine architect, where she was converted to her present rig.

Today, the Pilgrim provides a national award-winning living history program to more than 16,000 students a year.

The museum is on the waterfront at the Santa Barbara Harbor, 113 Harbor Way, Ste. 190, Santa Barbara. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6

p.m. daily through Labor Day. Admission ranges from $2 to $7.