The Pride of Baltimore rose from the banks of the Inner Harbor in 1976 like a ghost, a regal reminder of the old city's fading industry and vitality.
  Its designers wanted it to be just like the majestic Baltimore clippers built in the city's shipyards 150 years before. And it was. But its authenticity shaped its doom in the spring of 1986, on the longest trans-Atlantic voyage the Pride ever attempted.
Former Baltimore Sun reporter Tom Waldron outlines for the first time the details of what happened before and after the sinking of the beloved topsail schooner in his first book, the just-published "Pride of the Sea."
  The tale is part "The Perfect Storm," part "Into Thin Air," as Waldron describes how the unlikely boat took shape on a makeshift shipyard at the Inner Harbor, and the details of how a storm sank it nine years later on a 2,800-mile trip home from islands off the northwest coast of Africa.
  The accident killed four sailors; eight survived. Waldron got to know six of them in extensive interviews that revealed how they lived through five hellish days at sea before being rescued by an oil tanker.
  He concludes that the city-owned Pride was a beautiful, fast clipper that was unbelievably like the ships built from 1795 to 1815 that won worldwide acclaim for their ability to outrun the predatory boats of the British navy. But it was not an even-tempered boat, and it apparently was not a safe boat.
  It had a V-shaped hull to cut waves, and it carried a rigging of sails stacked like layers of a wedding cake. But the boat was top-heavy and sat low in the water. Its old-fashioned hull was built without any of the modern weight usually added under the keel, the piece of wood that runs the length of a boat.
Instead, the Pride relied on historically accurate -- and less secure -- internal ballast to keep it from blowing over. Even that protection fell short: Waldron found that the boat was never outfitted with ballast heavy enough to meet the architect's specifications.
Its designer, Annapolis artist and sailor Melbourne Smith, made it known he envisioned a boat that was so accurate it would "stand no chance of being certified by the Coast Guard," Waldron wrote, leaving the boat to carry only a paid crew and no passengers. Smith's romantic proposal generated such a fever among city officials that they never followed through on endeavors to make the boat safer.
  Over the short life of the boat, the problems were exacerbated instead of resolved, Waldron found. Crews began strapping more water and fuel to the deck, because of the lack of cargo room below, making the Pride even more top-heavy.
The boat had no watertight bulkheads, or compartments. So, when the ship took on water below deck, there was nothing to stop it from flooding. And, as Waldron describes, water flowed in often. The Pride's crews knew it to be a wet, wet boat because of its tendency to dip below the waves. Veteran crew members called it the "Flexible Flyer" and the "wild, black mare." So much water sloshed aboard so often that a "slippery, green growth appeared mid-ship," Waldron writes.
Pride of Baltimore II, the ship's successor, traded historic accuracy for modern bulkheads and a keel made of lead.
  The original Pride had many mishaps. The book reveals that a year before its sinking, the Pride blew over in the Baltic Sea and washed five crew members overboard -- an accident that shook the confidence of captain Armin Elsaesser. After the near-disaster, he nagged his crew to wear harnesses, which tethered them to the boat and kept them from being blown away when the ship seesawed.
  The captain's girlfriend, Jennifer Lamb, said after the Baltic accident that she thought Elsaesser wouldn't have wanted to survive if the Pride and its crew went down.
  A year later, Elsaesser did go down with the Pride. Waldron describes what the survivors saw as they bobbed in the Atlantic: the chilling sight of their captain swimming methodically away from the life rafts. They shouted, "Armin! Armin!"
"Eventually, the shouting stopped. Armin was gone." Why he swam away is still a mystery.
  Five days passed before anyone in Baltimore knew of the accident and that four people had drowned.
The catastrophe was a stunning blow for a city that had looked to the boat as a symbol of its revival, said Waldron, who was a new reporter for The Sun at the time.
  "I just don't think the city had ever contemplated that this could happen," he said.
Baltimore was falling apart, with record murder rates and drug problems, but it still had "one hell of a history," Waldron wrote. Officials capitalized on it when they banded together to commission the ship in the late 1970s.
  "So here comes this beautiful boat that was part of the Inner Harbor renaissance," Waldron said. "This boat just capped it off, like the cherry on the ice cream sundae. It was gorgeous. Everyone was proud of it."
  The Pride became part of the city's identity as it sailed to the Panama Canal, the Caribbean, South America and Europe. The view of the Pride in full sail was a "splendid sight," Waldron wrote.
  One of Waldron's difficulties, he said, was deciding after more than a year of research whether he thought the Pride was a good idea. It bolstered Baltimore's spirit, and spread international publicity for the city as it sailed from port to port.
  But Waldron says, in retrospect, "It just doesn't seem worth the risk, to send young people out to sea on a boat like that."
It's an amorphous payoff, he said, the spreading of goodwill that the Pride aimed for.
  "I'm not saying they shouldn't have sailed the boat, but I'm saying there were a lot of warning signs," Waldron said.
  "It was what it was -- a beautiful, fast boat. But was it safe? ... obviously not."