Finally, in February 1783 the siege was lifted. The outcome of the Great Siege made it politically impossible for the British government to again consider trading away Gibraltar, even though King George III warned that it would be the source "of another war, or at least of a constant lurking enmity" and expressed his wish "if possible to be rid of Gibraltar ... I shall not think peace complete if we do not get rid of Gibraltar." General Eliott and the garrison were lauded for their heroism, and the tenacity of their defence of Gibraltar acquired, as one writer puts it, "a sort of cult status". The British public acquired "an emotional, albeit irrational, attachment to the place." The reputed impregnability of Gibraltar gave rise to the expression, which is still current today, of something being as "strong as the Rock of Gibraltar". Gibraltar as a colony Following the Great Siege, the civilian population of Gibraltar – which had fallen to under a thousand – expanded rapidly as the territory became both a place of economic opportunity and a refuge from the Napoleonic Wars. Britain's loss of North American colonies in 1776 led to much of her trade being redirected to new markets in India and the East Indies. The favoured route to the east was via Egypt, even before the Suez Canal had been built, and Gibraltar was the first British port reached by ships heading there. The new maritime traffic gave Gibraltar a greatly increased role as a trading port. At the same time, it was a haven in the western Mediterranean from the disruption of the Napoleonic Wars. Many of the new immigrants were Genoese people who had fled Napoleon's annexation of the old Republic of Genoa. By 1813 nearly a third of the population consisted of Genoese and Italians. Portuguese made up another 20 per cent, Spaniards 16.5 per cent, Jews 15.5 per cent, British 13 per cent and Menorcans 4 per cent. The young Benjamin Disraeli described the inhabitants of Gibraltar as a mixture of "Moors with costumes as radiant as a rainbow or Eastern melodrama, Jews with gaberdines and skull-caps, Genoese, Highlanders and Spanish." The inhabitants had a clear pecking order, with British officers at the top and Jews at the bottom. The American naval officer Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, writing in 1829, described the market traders and shoppers in what is now John Mackintosh