San Felipe de Barajas are the most completely preserved of those built by the Spaniards in South America). A guard system of zones divided the city into five districts: Santa Catalina, with the cathedral and many Andalusian-style palaces; Santo Toribio, inhabited by traders and the petty bourgeoisie; La Merced, where the headquarters of the fixed battalion was located; San Sebastián, a neighborhood of modest one-story houses, and finally, the suburb of Getsemani, a district of craftsmen and port workers. In March 1741 the city was besieged by the troops of the British Admiral, Edward Vernon, who arrived with a fleet of 186 ships and 23,600 men (the largest fleet ever assembled up to that time and one that would not be surpassed in size until the Normandy landings in World War II). He launched an assault against the 6 ships and 3,000 men of the garrison, but was repelled by Commander General Blas de Lezo, and finally driven away by Carlos Suillars of Desnaux, a colonel in the Spanish Royal Engineers, and his men. Emancipation In 1810, the Viceroyalty of New Granada consisted of 15 provinces, including that of Cartagena. While Veraguas, Panamá and Riohacha provinces remained under Spanish rule, the junta (governing board) of Santa Marta had the most royalists. In Popayán the people were initially loyal to Spain, but then rallied to the independence movement, recently triumphant in Cali. In Girón, Santander, the influential Catholic priest, Eloy de Valenzuela, although a Criollo, remained royalist. Cartagena, one of the principal cities in the New World Spanish Empire, was one of the first to rebel against the Spanish yoke. In the early 19th century, a few white Criollos, e.g., locally born people of Spanish ancestry, were given a classical education, some of them in Santa Fe, and a few even in Europe, and had begun to excel in literature and the arts, as well as professions such as medicine, law and the natural sciences. In the course of their studies, they had been exposed to liberal ideas of liberty and equality, and as they increasingly developed an identity as Hispanic Americans, they chafed at their secondary status in the Spanish colonial caste system to the Peninsulares, or Spanish-born Spaniards. Consequently, many of the Criollos began to think it was time to take the reins of government into their own hands, whatever the outcome of the war with Spain that was