The captain during his navigation could now think only of the ravenous appetite of the boilers.

It always seemed to him that the _Mare Nostrum_ was speeding along with excess steam.
"Half speed!" he would shout down the tube to his first engineer.
But in spite of this and many other precautions, the expense for fuel was enormously disproportioned to the tonnage of the vessel.

The boat was eating up all the profits.

Its speed was insignificant compared with that of a transatlantic steamer, though absurd compared with that of the merchant vessels of great hulls and little machinery that were going around soliciting cargo at any price, from all points.
A slave of the superiority of his vessel and in continual struggle with it, Ferragut had to make great efforts in order to continue sailing without actual heavy loss.

All the waters of the planet now saw the _Mare Nostrum_ specializing in the rarest kind of transportation.
Thanks to this expedient, the Spanish flag waved in ports that had never seen it before.
Under this banner, he made trips through the solitary seas of Syria and Asia Minor, skirting coasts where the novelty of a ship with a smoke stack made the people of the Arabian villages run together in crowds.
He disembarked in Phoenician and Greek ports choked up with sand that had left only a few huts at the foot of mountains of ruins, and where columns of marble were still sticking up like trunks of lopped-off palm trees.