I've only seen this kit in its Aurora guise, in which it appeared (I think) sometime in the mid- to late seventies. It was part of the small series that also included the Bonhomme Richard, Hartford, and Wanderer. I believe it was reissued fairly recently (i.e., within the last fifteen years or so) by Lindberg. I've read that the Aurora kit was a modified reissue of a kit sold by ITC, and I've read that the ITC kit, in turn was a modified issue of the Marx kit - with the metal deck removed. (Why on earth would anybody want to make the deck of a plastic sailing ship kit out of metal?) I'm not at all sure about that, though. I've never compared the contents of the Aurora box with any of the others.
In any case, Aurora apparently was responsible for the ghastly injection-molded "sails," which were cast integrally with the yards. That feature was common to all four kits in the series and, to my taste, just about wrecked them. This one in particular, if I remember correctly (not to be assumed by any means) was especially objectionable in that the "sails" seemed to be ripped off from one of the big Revell clipper kits (either the Cutty Sark or the Thermopylae). The sails in the Revell kits, of course, were vacuum-formed. That process leaves raised lines on one side of the "sail" and grooves on the other - which the injection-molded plastic ones in the Aurora kit faithfully reproduced. Those injection-molded "sails" were several scale inches thick, with ridiculous grooves in their aft sides. Ugh.
I think Aurora also stole some crew figures from Revell, and maybe from Airfix. Some of the figures in the Sea Witch kit bore a remarkable family resemblance to those in the Revell Bounty and Santa Maria, and the Airfix Endeavour - but without the incredibly precise details that characterized the figures in Revell kits. The Aurora ones were downright blobby by comparison.
With those awful sails out of the picture, though, it wasn't such a bad reproduction of the real ship. I think ITC (or Marx - whichever was the originator of it) probably pirated it from the wood kit by Marine Models. That's how quite a few of the very first plastic sailing ship kits got their starts.
The Sea Witch was a beautiful and important vessel - one of the first of the great American clippers. Howard I. Chapelle's The Search for Speed Under Sail includes a pretty good set of plans of her - at least the hull lines and external details. One of the first books by the famous early scale ship model authority Charles Davis, Ship Models: How To Build Them, has the Sea Witch as its focus; the book includes a set of fold-out plans, including a rigging plan. It's currently available in a nice, bargain-priced paperback edition from Dover Books. Model Expo sells it for $10.95. The book was originally published in about 1927, so don't expect it to offer much practical help for the modern plastic modeler. But the plans are, I think, reliable, and there's quite a bit of information about the details of the ship herself in the text. Here's a link: http://www.modelexpoonline.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.exe?FNM=03&T1=DP25170-5&UID=2006110421020707&UREQA=1&TRAN85=N&GENP=
Igore the photo of the beat-up model on the cover; it apparently was added by Dover, and has nothing to do with the contents.
Another book worth reading if you're interested in the subject is the historical novel The Sea Witch, by Alexander Laing. He was a maritime historian of considerability himself, who (I think) wrote novels to make ends meet. The fictional story he concocted around the Sea Witch sticks closely to her actual career, and contains some fine writing and fun characters.
Her external color scheme probably was the one carried by almost all American clippers: black hull over copper (or "yellow metal") bottom, perhaps with the various external rails either picked out in white paint or left unpainted and varnished. The rest of the colors on the one EPinniger's acquired are believable (unpainted deck planking, white inside the bulwarks, etc.), with the notable exception of those bright blue deckhouses and other deck furniture. A pale, greyish blue (sometimes referred to in contemporary accounts as "pearl color," though that term also seems to have referred sometimes to a shade of grey or green) does indeed seem to have been a fairly common color for the roofs of deckhouses, but the bulkheads almost certainlyl were painted white. (Incidentally, the horizontal planking on the sides of the main deckhouse is a strong indication that the ship in question is American. British deckhouses of the period usually were planked with vertical panels.) To my eye the blue on that model looks outrageously bright. If I were doing it I'd strip the existing blue (if possible) and paint the vertical surfaces white and the the roofs a dull blue-grey. It's also entirely possible that the roofs weren't painted at all; that they were treated the same as the deck planking. Deckhouse roofs often were surrounded by a shaped molding, which might be painted white.
Hope that helps at least a little. Good luck.