I agree with Gatto -- good pace, good imagery, and it would be good to tweak the formatting a tad. Adding an extra empty line between the paragraphs would also help out. Though, making it into log entries would be a bit difficult since this is a recount from 10 years back.
Speaking of! Towards the end of the piece, the writing implies that the entry was written a few days after the event, rather than 10 years back. Specifically:
So far, I'd learned that "foru" was their word for sand, and "mowus" was sea. For the first few minutes of contact, this was very productive.
Seems a little too recent for 10 years ago. (It's a little too non-past/present tense at the moment, despite the "was"s. Wases? Making things plural is strange). Edward recalling his exact motions from 10 years back is fine -- acceptable breaks from reality, or maybe he is recounting this from another journal -- but in the current framing this seems a little bit off. But hey! Easy fix: just put the beginning part as a flash-forward (eg in italics) and keep the remainder as-is.
...To elaborate what I'm going on about, the "So far" implies that
in the present, Edward has only learnt so many words despite this occurring 10 years ago. The bolded "this" is barely an issue, but coupled with the "So far" is not great. The rest is fine, it's just the "so far" that's bugging me. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this. =D
The way that Edward is learning the language seems a little bit unrealistic (https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/370/how-do-field-linguists-begin-to-study-an-undocumented-language-which-they-cannot). You'd have thunk he'd have attempted a language or two from around the parts, or the crew would have nicked a local from a nearby area who knew English to translate. =D
On the other hand, learning/studying new languages is hard and would be boring to read, so acceptable breaks from reality are acceptable! At least he was researching other languages from nearby.
(...But it would be hilarious if it turned out Edward was getting things completely wrong and the people were just going "why are you pointing at things, what are you doing here, strange ghost men." It would certainly be period-typical arrogance to think the "natives" immediately complied with the demands of the strange people who clearly have no idea how the world functions).
Building from that -- good work in making a period-typical individual, complete with period-typical European arrogance, racism, and so on. Don't worry about using non-mainstream words. In fact, do worry if Edward starts using mainstream words. He'd stop being period-typical! The worst of all things!
Normally I'd start poking at grammar and such, but first person (who is writing/recounting the piece in-universe) makes it tricky to know what's deliberate and what isn't. Plus I am unfamiliar with how 19th C folk talk, so any advice I give would be inaccurate at best.
...Seriously, Edward is great.