SNOW SQUALL: THE LAST AMERICAN CLIPPER SHIP, by Nicholas Dean & David C. Switzer; Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, and Maine Maritime Museum, Bath, 2001, 301 pages, $30.

The closest to a clipper ship most of us are likely to get these days is the label on a bottle of Cutty Sark scotch. But that portrait of what was an actual clipper is the most prevalent, primarily romantic, image we see in our mind’s eye when we hear the words “clipper ship.”

If this superbly researched and painstakingly detailed book does nothing else – and it does a great deal more – it will dispel the romance, the dreamy vision of fast, graceful ships with all sails set racing over the bounding main.

Built in Cape Elizabeth in 1851, the Snow Squall at 157 feet was a comparatively small clipper, but the ship worked as hard as any on the sea. Yes, it was fast, and, yes, it had graceful lines, but it never raced and never paraded: It worked. For 13 years, some of them Civil War years, Snow Squall sailed the world’s oceans hauling all sorts of freight for its owner, Charles R. Green.

The Snow Squall came to grief in the Falklands in 1864, all but abandoned on the wreck-strewn shores of Port Stanley, her seams opened, a hole stove in her planking. Too far from Maine to be rescued, it died there on the small harbor’s mud banks, where it would be still if it hadn’t been for Nick Dean, Dave Switzer and their gritty platoon of helpers.

Look at a map: See how far “down” the Falklands are. Conquering those distances and bringing a section of the Snow Squall’s bow back to Portland Harbor is one of the stories told in these pages. But this is a nautical layer cake of a book, and the archaeological tale of how that bow section was salvaged is but one of the richly flavored layers. That story is written by Switzer, whose prose escapes the leaden pace of most archaeological reports. He has a fine way with words and a refreshing candor about the Don Quixote quest he, Dean and their associates were so committed to.

His layers of the book come fore and aft; Dean’s affectionate history of the Snow Squall’s days at sea is sandwiched amidships, and a superbly detailed history it is. I have no way of knowing how long it took Dean to discover each of the tiny fragments of the ship’s entire sailing career, but I’m certain every reader will agree it took at least one lifetime. And it was done without the ship’s logs, which most probably still are under Port Stanley mud.

Make no mistake: This is the work of a scholar, a historian worthy of the title. Each Snow Squall voyage becomes a chapter. We sail with the ship, its several captains, and several raffish crews to China, Australia, Java, England, Rio, the Falklands, across all the vast oceans of the globe, traveled so resolutely by this diminutive wooden vessel fashioned by Maine shipbuilders in Cape Elizabeth.

It is Dean’s eye for anecdote that leavens this history with a readable airiness. Telling us how Chinese stevedores filled the clipper’s hull with tea chests, he writes: “The Chinese were skilled at stowing the chests of various sizes, which ranged in weight from just over 100 to about 24 pounds. According to one shipping manual, ‘when stowing the last chest in an early tier, a Chinaman, rather than strike it with any hard instrument, walks off to a distance, and running back jumps into the air and falls in a sitting posture on the chest, which is thus sent uninjured into its place.'”

We are told how often crews jumped ship, and we can sympathize when we learn that “… a seaman’s life under sail in the 19th century was a dangerous one, with an accident rate four times greater than coal mining. Roughly half the deaths at sea were caused by falling or being washed overboard.”

There are countless such colorful details sprinkled like spice throughout this fine book’s rich mix. And each and every one, as you might expect when a historian is at work, is fully footnoted at each chapter’s end. As I said, there’s a lifetime of dedicated work here.

The Snow Squall’s saga at sea was, in many ways, less arduous than the effort to salvage her bow and haul it thousands of miles north. But do it they did, retrieving a section of Maine’s maritime past, the last surviving American-built clipper ship. On the afternoon of March 11, 1987, the ship carrying the bow section, built just a few miles away 135 years earlier, entered Portland Harbor and the graceful bow of the Snow Squall was back where she had been born.

More happened after that, but that story is yet another layer of this sumptuous and well-illustrated book. There’s even icing on the cake: The book’s final pages are filled with fine reproductions of the Snow Squall’s plans and lines.

You’ll never again have to study a Cutty Sark label to know what clipper ships were all about.