They had popped overboard in their excitement.
"I tell you what, fellows," whispered Phil Adams, "it is lucky we didn't try to touch 'em off with punk.

They'd have blown us all to flinders." The destruction of Bailey's Battery was not, unfortunately, the only catastrophe.

A fragment of one of the cannon had earned away the chimney of Sailor Ben's cabin.

He was very mad at first, but having prepared the fuse himself he didn't dare complain openly.
"I'd have taken a reef in the blessed stove-pipe," said the Admiral, gazing ruefully at the smashed chimney, "if I had known as how the Flagship was agoin' to be under fire." The next day he rigged out an iron funnel, which, being in sections, could be detached and taken in at a moment's notice.

On the whole, I think he was resigned to the demolition of his brick chimney.