As the peace negotiators talked across the Atlantic, an express messenger arrived in Mobile, bringing Jackson bad news. His hunch had been correct: the British were indeed planning to land along the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans. The dispatch Jackson received at five o’clock on the evening of August 27, 1814, reported that three warships, the HMS Hermes, Carron, and Sophie from the Royal Navy station at Bermuda, had already landed a small force of men and armaments at Pensacola in Spanish Florida.
