They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do: in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is... they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all her shrieking crew.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

There are two ironies about the Great Lakes: first, that the people who have become most dependent upon them have misused them the most; and second, that dispite our abuse of them the lakes remain as wondrous as they must have seemed to Melville and indeed to Etenne Brulé, the first European to see them, when he stood on the shores of Georgian Bay in 1610.
John Rousmaniere, The Enduring Great Lakes