Stan Hugill's source is his "friend Mr. K. Suyk" who himself received it from "Captain Spaandarman, over eighty years of age". The captain said:
The first steamer of the Nederlands Steam Navigation Company (now the Holland-America line) was rigged as a brig, with two square-rigged masts. She still had an old-fashioned man-handled capstan. The ship lay in the roads at Hellevoetsluis, about to make her first passage to America. Her ex-sailing-ship hands raised the anchor to this shanty. Later, I joined the bark Senior, aboard which sailed some members of the Dutch steamer already mentioned, and when this sailing ship was at anchor in False Bay, near the Cape of Good Hope, we signaled for a tug to take us to Cape Town.
We had sixty fathoms of chain out and when we came to weigh anchor, the Iron Man was the shanty we raised.
Baggerman, mentioned in this shanty, was a public house master who had several daughters. Stan Hugill explains that in the old days, before the Canal (the Nieuwe Waterweg system) was cut through, ships would lie in the roads at Hellevoetsluis (a small coastal city west of Rotterdam) instead of going up to Rotterdam. The crimps would bring crews out in small boats from the boarding houses of Rotterdam's Schedamschedyk.
Hugill explicitly mentions that this song has been bowdlerized. As in most of Hugill's translations, he was able to give away slightly more in the original language.