This is not perhaps one of Kipling's best poems. It was written especially for a school text book published in 1911 and was therefore intended for a juvenile audience. As part of the propaganda of a maritime empire, it is perhaps fascinating to deconstruct it. The steamers, it may be observed, are big. Indeed, in the original the repeated titular refrain of Big Steamers is always capitalised. They run on and they carry British coal. But the stress is entirely on food, not industrial raw materials. The fundamental message is that the British are fed by imports, and that starvation faces those who do not provide an adequate, protective Big Navy to deal with big waters, not piffling channels. Inevitably, all the places mentioned are in the formal British Empire. It is, in short, a combined paean of praise to the merchant marine, supposed imperial economic integration, and the activities of the Navy League. Although the poem never appeared in Kipling anthologies until comparatively recently, the text continued in print and was repeatedly recommended for use in schools down to at least the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1946, the popular Clydeside maritime historian George Blake lamented that the British did not know enough about the ships and the sea on which they depended.