Bernhardus Varenius

Life

His early years (from 1627) were spent at Uelzen, where his father was court preacher to the duke of Brunswick. Varenius studied at the gymnasium of Hamburg (1640–1642), and at Königsberg (1643–1645) and Leiden (1645–1649) universities, where he devoted himself to mathematics and medicine, taking his medical degree at Leiden in 1649. He then settled at Amsterdam, intending to practice medicine. But the recent discoveries of Abel Tasman, Willem Schouten and other Dutch navigators, and his friendship for Willem Blaeu and other geographers, attracted Varenius to geography. He died in 1650, aged only twenty-eight, a victim to the privations and miseries of a poor scholar's life.