There are many things that I recognize are a product of the fact that this book was written in 1720, before the form of the novel really became popular.  Things like the inconsistency of the tense, which switches from present tense to past tense without rhyme or reason, or the fact that I have rarely read a book that was paced so inconsistently (in the first seven pages of the book, our protagonist has been kidnapped, and then taken on by someone else, and then press ganged, and then taken by Portuguese sailors and then marooned on Madagascar, and then then next 130 pages are spent with the driest overland journey across Africa that I have ever read in my life).  I can also recognize that for a book written in 1720, this book probably could have been <i>more</i> racists, but that doesn't change the the fact that it was still extremely racist.  

I can recognize that a lot of this is because it was written in 1720.  That doesn't mean that that knowledge made this book at all more enjoyable. 

(Though I will say I appreciated how extremely gay the end of this narrative is. But alas, even that couldn't save it.)