Silly me, thinking that a 19th century book about a slave revolt would be about anything except the white men surviving the brutal "negroes" that overtook the ship. For a short novel, this dragged for me. The first chunk of it is clearly meant to provoke intrigue, but I just had trouble getting attached to the various sailors and the narrators' cold, anthropological observations of slaves on the ship. And then the actual action of the story is introduced, it's all reported in a cold, recap of someone just reciting facts.