WORKMEN found a 100-year-old letter behind an old fireplace while carrying out work in a house in Burnley, in 1950.

It had been sent from a Mrs M Rishton, who had left her home town for a new life in America in 1845 and settled in America.

Workmen unearthed the missive, addressed to William Lister, while renovating a house in Bridge Street, part of which used to be the Kings Arms.

Mrs Rishton began with the typical courtesy of the time: “Dear brother and sister, According to your desires and with great respect I embrace this opportunity to write to you.”

But then she suddenly breaks into a hair raising account of her passage, from Liverpool to Boston, which took six weeks and two days.

The ship encountered 14 gales and struck an iceberg, cabins were three feet deep in water and boxes ‘broke to shivers’.

An 11-year-old was killed by a wave which washed her from one side of the vessel to the other and another passenger died from the cold.

She wrote: “We expected to go to the bottom every day and I thought I should never see land again.”

Her husband Henry was saved by the ship’s mate just as he was being swept through a hole in the bulwarks and members of the family were still ill a fortnight after putting into Boston.

But Mrs Rishton ended by advising those back in her home town who were ‘plagued for work’ to join her in ‘this fruitful land’.