bluish, more solid look.

It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down to a fragment, but still
big enough to sink a ship, and floating lower than any raft, right
in our way, as if ambushed among the waves with murderous intent.
There was no time to get down on deck. I shouted from aloft till
my head was ready to split. I was heard aft, and we managed to
clear the sunken floe which had come all the way from the Southern
ice-cap to have a try at our unsuspecting lives. Had it been an
hour later, nothing could have saved the ship, for no eye could
have made out in the dusk that pale piece of ice swept over by the
white-crested waves.

And as we stood near the taffrail side by side, my captain and I,
looking at it, hardly discernible already, but still quite close-to
on our quarter, he remarked in a meditative tone:

"But for the turn of that wheel just in time, there would have been
another case of a 'missing' ship."

Nobody ever comes back from a "missing" ship to tell how hard was
the death of the craft, and how sudden and overwhelming the last
anguish of her men. Nobody can say with what thoughts, with what
regrets, with what words on their lips they died. But there is
something fine in the sudden passing away of these hearts from the
extremity of struggle and stress and tremendous uproar--from the
vast, unrestful rage of the surface to the profound peace of the
depths, sleeping untroubled since the beginning of ages.