On May 3, 1782, voyageur Venant St. Germain was camped on the shore of Lake Superior across from Isle Royale. He was watching the sun set with three comrades and an elderly Ojibwe woman when an unusual creature about 75 yards offshore caught his eye.

It "appeared to him to have the upper part of its body, above the waist, formed exactly like that of a human being" and "seemed to him about the size of... a child of seven or eight years of age." Its countenance "bore an exact resemblance to those of the human face" and it had brilliant eyes, a raised hand of fully formed fingers, and a dark complexion.

Gun in hand, St. Germain was preparing to shoot the creature and save it for science when the Indian woman attacked him. During their tussle the creature disappeared below the water.

Distraught, the woman reproached St. Germain for his wicked intentions. She explained that the mermaid was a god of the lakes and that merely by trying to kill it he would raise a storm powerful enough to kill them all. And for the next three days, the little group of travelers was stranded onshore by gale force winds and crashing waves.

Although St. Germain encountered another fur trader who claimed to have seen a similar creature in the same part of Lake Superior, most people doubted his story. This led him to provide sworn testimony of his encounter with the merman of Lake Superior before a Canadian court in 1812.