In the first few decades of the 19th century, White European-American culture, especially the Anglophone—the sailors' "Cheer'ly Man" and some capstan songs notwithstanding—was not known for its work songs. By contrast, African workers, both in Africa and in the New World, were widely noted to sing while working. According to Gibb Schreffler, an Assistant Professor of Music at Pomona College, European observers found African work-singers remarkable (as Schreffler infers from tone of their descriptions). Schreffler further infers that that work songs may have been foreign to European culture (See, however, references to nautical work songs among European sailors appearing in such sources as "The Tempest"). Such references begin to appear in the late 18th century, whence one can see the cliché develop that Black Africans "could not" work without singing. For example, an observer in Martinique in 1806 wrote, "The negroes have a different air and words for every kind of labour; sometimes they sing, and their motions, even while cultivating the ground, keep time to the music." So while the depth of the African-American work song traditions is now recognized, in the early 19th century they stood in stark contrast to the paucity of such traditions among Euro-Americans. Thus while European sailors had learned to put short chants to use for certain kinds of labor, the paradigm of a comprehensive system of developed work songs for most tasks may have been contributed by the direct involvement of or through the imitation of African-Americans. The work contexts in which African-Americans sang songs comparable to shanties included: