The Dinner Party

The story goes like this. One evening in January 1857, a French warship arrived at Aden, the British port at the southern tip of Arabia. The British governor, a brigadier named William Coghlan, invited the captain and his officers to dinner. He had a hunch about why they’d come. For months there’d been talk that France wanted Perim, a little volcanic island about 100 miles west of Aden, sitting right in the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea. So Coghlan kept the wine coming. Sometime after the plates were cleared, one of the Frenchmen, a few glasses past careful, let it slip that they were sailing in the morning to plant the French flag on Perim. Coghlan excused himself from the table and gave the order. While his guests kept drinking, a boatload of British soldiers left the harbor in the dark. When the French ship reached Perim the next day, the soldiers were already on the beach, and a British flag was flying over the rock.

People loved it. A British cabinet minister was still telling it that way years later, and by 1901 an American newspaper had added an Irish maid who coaxed the secret out of a French sailor.

Two empires were racing each other to a rock about 3.5 miles long, with no fresh water and no real harbor, because of what everyone could see coming. The French were already planning a canal at Suez, at the Red Sea’s northern end, to connect it to the Mediterranean. If the canal got built, the strait at the southern end, Bab el-Mandeb, between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, would become one of the most important stretches of water on earth, and Perim sits in the middle of it. The canal opened in 1869. For nearly a century afterward, every ship traveling between Europe and Asia sailed past a British flag on the island France lost at a dinner party.

The long way and the shortcut. Map data: Natural Earth. Graphic: Four Fingers News.

France, shut out, bought a strip of coast across the strait in 1862. That foothold grew into Djibouti, which still hosts French troops today, along with American and Chinese bases. Britain kept Perim until it pulled out of Aden in 1967.

The doorway, and who holds which side of it. Map data: Natural Earth. Graphic: Four Fingers News.

Coghlan spent years insisting it hadn’t happened the way people told it. He said he’d had orders from Bombay to beat the French to Perim long before their ship showed up, and that nobody mentioned the island at dinner. Hardly anyone listened, which tells you which version was more fun to repeat.

The island went quiet after Britain left Aden in 1967. Then in 2021 satellite photos showed trucks building a runway more than a mile long across it, big enough for warplanes. No country admitted building it, and the ships hauling in equipment had switched off the transponders that broadcast their locations. Yemeni officials said the United Arab Emirates was behind it. This year Perim has changed hands twice. Ansarallah, the Iran-aligned movement that governs northern Yemen, took it as part of the Iran war, and on Oct 9 Yemen’s Saudi-backed government said its forces had taken it back. Ansarallah denies that.

Whether or not the dinner happened, the race it stands for has never stopped. The people running it now aren’t waiting for anyone to get drunk.

Sources (10), on the site.