Baltimore ? 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 the details of what happened before and after the sinking of the beloved topsail schooner in his first book, “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 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 also revealed how they lived through five hellish days at sea before being rescued by an oil tanker.

The city-owned Pride, he says, 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 the Pride 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.

The boat had no watertight bulkheads, or compartments. So, when the Pride took on water below deck, there was nothing to stop it from flooding. And, as Waldron describes, water flowed in often. The ship 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.

Tom Waldron, writer of the new book Pride

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.