This is a quote from Chapter 54 of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, first published in 1851. It is one rather large paragraph, but we'll quote it as is:
"For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand freshwater seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean- like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. 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 furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; 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 its shrieking crew."
I'll just add that not only is this great literature, but he points out the dangers of boating on the Great Lakes. People often asked us if we felt safer, after we traded in our 26 foot boat for a 32 foot boat. We would say "The Edmund Fitzgerald was 760 feet long, and still went down in a storm." Better to avoid bad weather than try to ride it out.
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Updated March 23, 2019