Events in the news this week.

Stanley Cummings, director of the Orange County Marine Institute in Dana Point, is scheduled to speak Tuesday before the Maritime Committee of the House of Representatives in an effort to gain an exemption from the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 for the institute’s brig, Pilgrim. The act prohibits foreign-built or registered vessels from doing business in the United States.

The foreign-built Pilgrim was a Baltic trader before being re-outfitted to resemble the brig in which Richard Henry Dana sailed in the 1830s, a voyage that became the basis for his classic “Two Years Before the Mast.” The institute’s ship, now used for educational and historical purposes, is scheduled to re-create the original Pilgrim’s voyage along the California coast this summer in honor of Orange County’s centennial.

Exemptions from the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 have been granted to other historical ships in the past.