1876        Warner, Charles Dudley. _My Winter On the Nile, Among the Mummies and Moslems._ Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company.

Preface dated Oct. 1875. Warner is on a sail-boat on the Nile in December 1874. Some of the chants of Egyptian boatmen are mentioned, e.g. "Yah! Mohammed!" In one of the descriptions, he indicates that the English would refer to the singer as "shanty man." It would seem that he heard this in use; it is possible he also read the term in an earlier work—though only N. Adams (1971) had previously used that orthography.

Pp153-154:

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The morning finds us still a dozen miles from Asioot where we desire to celebrate Christmas; we just move with sails up, and the crew poling. The head-man chants a line or throws out a word, and the rest come in with a chorus, as they walk along, bending the shoulder to the pole. The leader—the "shanty man" the English sailors call their leader, from the French chanter I suppose—ejaculates a phrase, sometimes prolonging it, or dwelling on it with a variation, like "O ! Mohammed!" or "O! Howadji!" or some scraps from a love-song, and the men strike in in chorus: "Ha Yalesah, ha Yalesah," a response that the boatmen have used for hundreds of years.
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