Lighter, Keith linked the Kipling website previously. If you click on "poem" to the right, the first verse has "lazy...." So naturally I assumed etc. etc.
It does give the information that the poem was published in the Scots Observer, 1890.
I must admit that I didn't read any more of the article, only looked at the pictures.

Scroll way down, and the note appears:
"lookin' lazy at the sea 'lookin' eastward at the sea' in the original version but corrected by Kipling when it was pointed out to him that Moulmein had no view of the sun rising over the Bay of Bengal, still less over China. See the notes below on the chorus."

Farther on, "As Kipling later observed [other points of jumbled geography] in the poem]: "Had I opened the chorus of the song with 'Oh' instead of 'On the road.' etc., it might have shown that the song was a sort of general mix-up of the singer's Far-Eastern memories against a background of the Bay of Bengal as seen at dawn from a troop-ship taking him there. But 'On' in this case was more singable than 'Oh.' That simple explanation may stand as a warning.""

Perhaps we should "take a warning" that our insistence on ferreting out details should not get in the way of our enjoyment of the song.