There was no glossary in the vintage edition I read, but I didn't stop to look up the nautical terms, having a guess instead. So, the action aboard the ship remained a little muddy for me, and there is a lot of action in this short book. But a couple of things are clear from reading this:

Conrad is intimately familiar with shipboard life, and he covers it in gritty realistic detail.
Despite the realism, Conrad announces in the preface his intention is to make art, so while trying to follow the action I was also reading for possible allegories, particularly with the title character James Wait, set apart both by the color of his skin and his behavior. On that note, late in the book the narrator turns inward a bit, saying,
"here could be no greater criminals than we, who by our lies conspired to send the soul of a poor ignorant black man to everlasting perdition."
Is this the statement of an author of the time who believes in the "civilizing" force of colonialism, or simply a statement of this one character in a sea story?

The prose style is certainly of the time, if on the modernist edge of the Victorian era, and my one fault with the narration is that Conrad is sometimes unclear if the narrator is a member of the crew (it becomes clear by the end, he is.) If one hasn't read Conrad before, I would go straight to Heart of Darkness, but this was worth the investment.