Well, the British navy have lost a couple of ships in battles, though, not against men with sticks ... I recall a particular one (with German battleship, though) and the postmortem I watched indicated that the UK ship was in breach of safety regs; apparently is was quite common to not keep an air-gap between all the constituent links in the chain from storage of the munitions to the guns, which caused a stray spark form the gun to ignite the entire load of munitions. Apparently, this was common lexa-non-scripta practice for the navy, as it allowed the teams to speed up the reloading process significantly. I guess the reason for health and safety regulations was brought home with such incidents ... :D