With the new year Fairfax commissioned the Berwick, a 70-gun ship, in which he sailed in March to join Sir George Rooke and the grand fleet at Lisbon. With this the Berwick continued during the summer and was one of the six ships which vainly chased a French squadron off Cape Palos on 8 May - a failure for which Fairfax and the other captains were tried by court-martial, but fully acquitted. He was one of the division actually engaged under Byng at the reduction of Gibraltar (23 July), for his share in which exploit ‘the Queen afterwards presented Fairfax with a silver cup and cover bearing a suitable inscription, which is still preserved by his descendants’. The Berwick took an honourable part in the Battle of Málaga (13 Aug.), where her masts, rigging, and sails were shattered and torn, and she had sixty-nine men killed and wounded. The fleet afterwards returned to England for the winter, and in the following February the Berwick was paid off at Chatham.