An interesting combination of swashbuckling adventure and some appeal to puritan values.
p. 313, on an imperious mate squashing a mutinous crew: This man seemed alone on the earth; I never heard him speak of his friends, or of his home. The gentler affections seemed to be a stranger in his bosom….
He seldom took a book in his hand, unless it was Bowditch’s Navigator, or a Coast Pilot; excepting on the Sabbath, when he invariably passed a portion of the day in his state-room, reading some book, whose title he carefully concealed from my view; and once or twice on that day, when the steward opened his door suddenly to tell him it was his watch on deck, I observed him to be busily engaged in reading some papers, which he hastily put away when discovered. [On the return journey from Batavia Mr. Smith threw himself overboard and drowned. The fictional nature of this narrative becomes clear in the account of his suicide and its cause, his murder of a passenger.]