Qualla: Perim

Perim: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, c. 1885, Public domain. Roughly 60,000 years ago, when the seas were locked into ice-age glaciers and the Bab-el-Mandeb was shallow or dry, some of the earliest modern humans to leave Africa may have crossed here. Perim - the Arabs called it Mayyun, the Portuguese called it Vera Cruz, and the British simply took it - sits in the middle of that strait, splitting the Bab-el-Mandeb into two channels and guarding the entrance to the Red Sea. It is a crab-shaped piece of an eroded volcano whose center once stood on the southwesternmost tip of Arabia. There is no fresh water on it. There has rarely been enough rain to matter. And yet for two hundred years, the great naval powers have fought over what this small, treeless, thirsty island represents.

Read more: Perim on Qualla

Image: Unknown, c. 1885 | Public domain

Perim: Bypassed by Written History

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sir William Rawson (1812-1899), Public domain. Ancient geographers noticed Perim. Pliny the Elder mentioned it. Ptolemy charted it. The author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote of it as the island of Diodorus. Then for centuries almost nothing. Fishermen came seasonally from the Yemeni mainland. Pearl divers built h...

Read more: Perim on Qualla

Image: Sir William Rawson (1812-1899) | Public domain

Perim: The British Decade and the Lighthouse

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit French magazine L'Illustration, 24 April 1858, Public domain. In December 1856, with the Suez Canal under construction and Prime Minister Palmerston worried that French ambitions in Egypt might become French control of the Red Sea, London ordered the occupation of Perim. The actual landing party was small and peaceful - the island was uninh...

Read more: Perim on Qualla

Image: French magazine L'Illustration, 24 April 1858 | Public domain

Perim: The BBC and the Fire

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anonymous. Cropped from postcard issued c. 1900, Public domain. In 1964, Perim took on one last British role. The Diplomatic Wireless Service moved its Middle East Relay Station here after losing its Somali base in a diplomatic dispute. Twenty prefabricated houses went up on the western side of the island for the engineers and their families....

Read more: Perim on Qualla

Image: Anonymous. Cropped from postcard issued c. 1900 | Public domain

Perim: Banished and Returned

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Inconnu (provient d'un livre publié en Égypte en 1938)., Public domain. When Soviet forces gained access to the naval base at Aden in the 1970s and to Perim as a listening post, the roughly 4,500 native inhabitants of Perim were banished from the island. They scattered across the Yemeni mainland. Their homes remained empty for most of a generation. A...

Read more: Perim on Qualla

Image: Inconnu (provient d'un livre publié en Égypte en 1938). | Public domain

Perim: Approach from the Air

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Kleiner (photo taken 19.02.2007, uploaded 25.06.2007), Public domain. Perim is approximately 13 square kilometers of dark volcanic rock, its coastline indented with the natural harbor that once made it a coaling power. From altitude it sits like a dark spot in the turquoise of the strait, with the Shaykh Said Peninsula of Yemen immediately to the n...

Read more: Perim on Qualla

Image: Michael Kleiner (photo taken 19.02.2007, uploaded 25.06.2007) | Public domain