What is now known as Burrard Inlet has been home to the Indigenous peoples of the Musqueam, Squamish people and Tsleil-waututh, who have resided in this territory for thousands of years. In 1791, the first European explorers in the region, Juan Carrasco and José María Narváez, sailing under orders of Francisco de Eliza, entered the western part of the inlet in their ship, the Santa Saturnina. They failed to find the Fraser River, mistaking the lowland of the river's delta as a major inlet of the sea, which they named Canal de Floridablanca. This led to one of the prime objectives of the 1792 expedition of Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, which was to determine the exact nature of the Canal de Floridablanca. Galiano spent many days exploring the general area, realizing that there was a great river there and sighting Burrard Inlet itself on June 19, 1792. Just days later, the inlet was again named by Captain George Vancouver, after his friend and former shipmate Captain Sir Harry Burrard. In 1888, the inlet was described in The British Columbia Pilot published by the British Admiralty as follows.
Geography
The inlet runs almost directly east from the Strait of Georgia to Port Moody and is urbanized on most of its shores. About two-thirds of the way east from the inlet's mouth, a secondary, much steeper-sided, glacial fjord, Indian Arm, extends straight north from the main inlet, between Belcarra and Deep Cove in North Vancouver, then on into mountainous wilderness. From Point Atkinson and Point Grey on the west to Port Moody in the east, the inlet is about long; Indian Arm extends about north. Settlements on the shores of Burrard Inlet include Vancouver, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Burnaby, and Port Moody. Three bridges, the First Narrows Bridge , the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing and the CNR railway bridge at the Second Narrows, and the SeaBuspassenger ferry, cross the inlet. Aside from just east of the inlet's mouth, it is widest between the First and Second Narrows, also the busiest part of Vancouver's port.
Port of Vancouver
Protected from the open ocean, the calm waters of Burrard Inlet form Vancouver's primary port area, an excellent one for large ocean-going ships. While some of the shoreline is residential and commercial, much is port-industrial, including railyards, terminals for container and bulk cargo ships, grain elevators, and oil refineries. Freighters waiting to load or discharge cargoes in the inlet often anchor in English Bay, which lies south of the mouth of the inlet and is separated from it by Vancouver's downtown peninsula and Stanley Park. On the main inlet, a few park areas remain forested as they were centuries ago, but the steep slopes of Indian Arm are so impassable that most have seen no development, despite the proximity of such a major city. Only in 2003 was a rough wilderness hiking trail around the whole of Indian Arm completed, and it was the work of one man over many years.
