Know-it-All: Why Is it Called False Creek?

Obviously, there’s a lot of criticism we should heap on the original colonial settlers of this land, but I think it’s fair to give at least one accolade to “explorer” Captain George Richards: the man wasn’t afraid to admit when he was wrong.

When Richards stumbled across a sandy channel—called Snauq by local Indigenous communities—as he was out surveying the coast in his little party boat back in 1859 (classic Captain Richards!), he was like, “We’ve got ourselves a creek, boys! Somebody write this down!” before immediately, humbly, graciously being like, “No, wait, oops, ha ha, my bad.”

Obviously, as we all know from the Oxford Dictionary (an underrated beach read) an inlet is “a small arm of the sea, a lake or a river” and a creek is “a narrow inlet.” Mixing these two things up could be humiliating for any of us, but for a captain, is particularly egregious. (More egregious than just renaming things willy-nilly on stolen land? No, but that’s for a different column.)

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But if I may defend Captain Richards, who, if paintings are to be believed, had the hair of a young Conan O’Brien and the nose of an old Adrien Brody: Is he not human? Is he not allowed to be flawed? I mean, who among us has not “phoned it in” on occasion? Have we not encountered enough LinkedIn articles by hustle-culture-pilled ex-boyfriends to know by now that failure is actually how we grow? Was Captain Richards not leading with vulnerability, just as so many Silicon Valley executives have tried to do after reading the back of a Brené Brown book in the airport on their way to SXSW?! 

And let’s not forget that the captain had other responsibilities on his plate as he managed a crew of sailors far from home: do you think it’s easy to remember what “an inlet” is when you’re figuring out an internal comms strategy for your latest scurvy outbreak? Honestly, I’m surprised how few middle-manager explorers were taking stress leave at that point in time.

But let’s put aside all of these excuses for why Richards got mixed up, and just admire that he called himself out. He could’ve corrected the error quietly, dubbing the waterway “Real Inlet,” or, you know, crazy idea, just let the people who were already living here keep the name they used, and the news cycle would’ve moved on. I would’ve been writing a column today about some other important Vancouver question like, “Why is there a pizza place called Straight Brooklyn and another one with the same font on their sign called Straight Outta Brooklyn?” But he didn’t hide. He didn’t make a half-assed YouTube apology video. He totally owned it, naming the inlet “False Creek” so that his error would be preserved for all time. Like a hero. Cancelled celebs, take note.

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Things have changed a lot since the 1850s, though. At the time, False Creek was twice as long, lined by sandy banks and reaching all the way to Clark Drive; then, in the 1920s, the marshy eastern stretch of the inlet was filled in to make space for a railyard. Today, the truncated “creek” is home to 10 marinas and notoriously disgusting waters, with a concentration of gastrointestinal- disease-causing bacteria that’s higher than 200 per 100 ml of water. So while False Creek started as a fun nickname honouring Richards’s cartographic goof, maybe it’s time to update it for a new age. Throw in a few periods and we can turn F.A.L.S.E. into an acronym that can prevent us all from making a more dire mistake than misidentifying an inlet: Forget About, Like, Swimming, Ew.