On New Year's Day 1811, the Rev. Henry Martyn, pale and still showing worrying indications of tubercular illness, ascended the pulpit of the Mission Church of Calcutta and preached a sermon entitled ‘The claims of Christian India, or an appeal in behalf of eight hundred thousand native Christians in India.’ The sermon was designed primarily to be printed and distributed as a fundraising appeal to launch the Calcutta auxiliary chapter of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). Martyn observed shortly afterwards that ‘None of the great were present; none of the clergy, though public notice was given.’ Nevertheless, donations began to arrive within hours and Anglicans and Baptists moved quickly to form the Calcutta Auxiliary.

Martyn had arrived at Aldeen, the home of David and Mary Brown, two months earlier, travelling from his station at Cawnpore. His health failing, Martyn had applied for medical leave from his chaplaincy posting in hopes that a sea voyage might both restore his failing health and provide him the opportunity to seek out expert opinion in Arabia and Persia regarding his ongoing Arabic and Persian Bible translations. Two weeks later, without final goodbyes and after only five years as an East India Company (EIC) chaplain in India, Martyn boarded the Ahmoody, bound for Bombay, accompanied by Mountstuart Elphinstone, recent Ambassador at Kabul and now appointed Resident at Poona. It was the first leg of a journey that would take him to Muscat and eventually to Persia, where he spent most of the final year and a half of his life. From there, having completed a translation of the New Testament and Psalms in Persian, he launched a final precipitous effort to return to Britain to recover his health. Martyn was overcome en route by fever in what is today Tokat, Turkey, on 16 October 1812. He was thirty-one. Fame followed. He had left behind him not only his Persian New Testament translation, but his translation of the New Testament in Hindoostanee, the language we today know as Urdu. He had made further strides on the Hindoostanee Old Testament and had overseen significant work on an Arabic translation of the New Testament. Despite such a record as a translator, however, Martyn's growing fame amongst Christians in Britain and America would rest upon a different foundation.