I don't know if you count these as literature, but there was one genre that might have references: the emigrant travel diary.

There must be thousands of these in existence - lots of people going on one-way trips across the ocean or on long military voyages would often keep them, and they often survive in family heirloom collections or, if you really get lucky, a publicly accessible library. Hardly any of them have been published. Most of the people who kept them would never have encountered shanties before, so they'd be a new experience, something you'd want to write down.