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.
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