On 15 June 1824 Heber set out on a tour of northern India, accompanied by his personal chaplain, Martin Stowe, and Daniel Corrie, the Archdeacon of Calcutta. Amelia remained in Calcutta; earlier in the year she had given birth to her third daughter, Harriet. The general plan was to travel by boat to the upper waters of the River Ganges, then overland into the foothills of the Himalayas before turning south and west, crossing Rajputana to reach Bombay. The journey was almost aborted near to its beginning when Stowe fell ill in Dacca (present-day Dhaka, Bangladesh) and died there; after some hesitation, Heber decided that the tour should continue. Early in August the party reached Benares (now Varanasi), the largest of the cities in the Ganges plain, where Heber spent several weeks. It was a wholly Indian city without a European population, sacred to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists but with a well-established CMS school and a substantial Christian minority. Heber consecrated a new church, and when he conducted a Holy Communion service in both English and Hindustani, a large congregation of Christians and Hindus thronged the church.