This is mildly entertaining in parts, but it is still a disaster. It reads very much like a hurried first draft that's been forcibly kept away from editors.

The biggest problem is that it's essentially two different adventure stories stuck together. The first is the tale of a mutiny and shipwreck, presented somewhat realistically. When the two survivors are picked up by an Antarctic-bound explorer ship, however... there's a boring few chapters that cover existing islands and histories of (again, realistically), and then the ship gets to the Antarctic and, well. There are polar bears and pelicans and woods and a whole society wandering around naked and sans frostbite, and I can live with how wrong it all is because Poe wrote this in the days before real Antarctic exploration and so he was making it all up from a blank slate, essentially, and doing the best he could even if his science was shite. That's not what makes me think of a bad first draft.

It's those two different voices and styles jammed together, and the hand-waving explanation for this at the beginning of the book that is deeply unconvincing. It's the ending that looks like he's sick of the story and given up in the middle of it. It's the fact that the dog just disappears randomly and is never mentioned again. It's that the shipwreck survivors resort to cannibalism before one of them remembers the axe with which they can break down the door behind which are actual provisions. It's the fact that one of said survivors dies from an infected arm and when they go to drop him over board his leg disintegrates.

It is just not well-written. Sorry, Mr. Poe, you are an excellent short story writer. Your novel, however, is a piece of wreckage that belongs at the bottom of the sea.