The most prosperous and promising days Pensacola ever saw, except those since the close of the civil war, were from 1772 to 1781. As the American revolution advanced, additions were made to the numbers, intelligence and wealth of its population, owing to causes already mentioned. It was the capital of a province rich in its forests, its agricultural and other resources. Its Bay was prized as the peerless harbor of the Gulf, which it was proposed by the British government to make a great naval station, a beginning in that direction having been made by selecting a site for a navy yard adjoining the town to the westward. Its commerce was daily on the increase; not only in consequence of the extension of Panton, Leslie & Co.’s trade with the Indians, but other enterprising merchants who had been added to the population, were engaged in an export trade, comprising pine timber and lumber, cedar, salt beef, raw hides, cattle, tallow, pitch, bear’s oil, staves, shingles, honey, beeswax, salt fish, myrtle wax[24], deer skins, dried venison, furs and peltry. This trade, and the £200,000 annually extended by the British government, as well as the disbursements of the shipping, constituted the sources of the prosperity of the town. This period, besides being a season of growth and prosperity to Pensacola, as well as the rest of the Province, was one of repose, undisturbed by the march of armies, battles, and the other cruel shocks of war that afflicted the northern colonies. But it was not to remain to the end a quiet spectator of the drama enacting on the continent. It, too, had an appointment with fate. Though not even a faint flash of the northern storm was seen on its horizon, yet there had been one for long brooding for it in the southwest. The earthquake, too, that visited it on the night of February 6, 1780,[25] was but a presage of that which on May 8, 1781, was to shake it to its center; and prove the signal of an exodus of the English almost as complete as was that of the Spanish population in 1763. ----- Footnote 15: Fairbank’s History of Florida, p. 223. Footnote 16: A name which the children of the neighborhood have bestowed on the bloom of a water plant, suggested by its wax like stem and its yellow point, and here mentioned to suggest to our people that it is time we should have popular designations for others of our beautiful wild flowers. Footnote 17: Fairbanks Florida, p. 219. Footnote 18: Pickett, Vol. II. p. 25. Footnote 19: Canadian Archives B. Vol. 15, p. 267. Footnote 20: Id. 15 p. 195. Footnote 21: Id. 17 p. 267. Footnote 22: Canadian Archives B. Vol. 15 p. 161. Footnote 23: Von Elking Vol. II p. 139. Footnote 24: This is the product of the wild myrtle, obtained by putting the seed into hot water, when the wax liquifies and floats on the surface. Footnote 25: