“The Sea Captain’s Wife” is a riveting tale about the journey of a clipper ship from New York to San Francisco in 1856.

As the ship rounds Cape Horn — there is, of course, no Panama Canal yet — a hurricane hits. The ship pitches and tosses, washed over with 50-foot waves. This is one of the worst storms in years, “a veritable blizzard at sea.”

Conditions are dire: The captain, Joshua Patten, is unconscious, deathly ill with tuberculosis; the first mate is in shackles, accused of mutiny; the illiterate second mate can’t read the navigational charts. Who steps in to take charge? The captain’s pregnant, 19-year-old wife, that’s who.

This is a thrilling story, well told, about Mary Ann Patten, the first woman to navigate the Southern Ocean. Unfortunately, her story only makes up about half of the book. Before you get to her romance with Joshua, her unusual upbringing (she’s the rare working-class girl who was educated), before you get to the storm, there are a lot of things that author Tilar J. Mazzeo (“The Widow Clicquot”) wants you to understand.

This can be frustrating — the storm doesn’t hit until about page 140. Fortunately, Mazzeo is an engaging writer, addressing the reader as “we” sometimes in a friendly fashion, walking us through family history and geography and the science of charts and maps, all necessary for understanding and appreciating Mary Ann’s story. Mazzeo throws in etymology, as well, educating on us how common phrases such as “learning the ropes” and “shipshape” came from life and work at sea.

Mazzeo, a former academic, did her research for this book and there are prodigious and interesting footnotes. But she also acknowledges there are gaps in what she can prove — missing logbooks, diaries never written, newspaper accounts that are inaccurate. So, right off the bat, in the book’s first sentence, she tells us this: “This story begins in another place, another time, in a world of which only fragments remain.”

Throughout, gracefully, she inserts caveats. At one point, “Mary Ann might have nodded.” And, “What exactly Mary Ann said in that dramatic moment was never recorded.” And, my favorite, “one likes to think.” (This in reference to whether or not Mary Ann was wearing a certain pair of earrings.)

There are other places, though, where the author — and, presumably, reader — must take a leap of faith. “Mary Ann’s heart sank.” “Here, Mary Ann paused.” The first mate’s face was “taut with tension.” How does she know such small, precise details?

Still, Mazzeo’s descriptions of the storm are vivid and chilling: By the second day, “the winds had reached sixty knots, driving snow and sleet that turned the rigging to ice. Waves fifty feet tall pummeled them.”

The story does not end once the ship reaches San Francisco. There are many loose ends to wrap up, and not all of them are happy. Perhaps the worst is the behavior of the shipping company that employed Joshua, in which it denied the hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to him for the journey because he “had been unconscious for most of the passage and had not, in fact, delivered the vessel. They had no obligation to pay the captain’s wife, who was, after all, not their employee and a woman.”

“And a woman." Sheesh. This book will leave you alternately shivering, cheering and seething.

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The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World

By: Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, 270 pages.

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