2025/05/03 by Bronwen Douglas, Matthew Spriggs · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/00223344.2024.2432374
openalex publication_date 2025/05/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
J.H.F. (Frits) Sollewijn Gelpke (1922–2013) was a Dutch civil servant in Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea from 1945 to 1962, ending his administrative career as appointed chairman of the short-lived self-governing Nieuw-Guinea Raad (Council), following open elections in January 1961. After his retirement, he brought multilingual scholarship and deep familiarity with places, Indigenous people, and their toponyms to the history of West New Guinea, the Raja Ampat Islands, and Maluku. Sollewijn Gelpke’s previously unpublished history of 16th-century Spanish voyages along the northwest New Guinea coast constitutes an important reinterpretation of routes taken and placenames, including endonyms, recorded by Spaniards between 1528 and 1545, set in the wider geopolitical context of rivalry with Portugal. His historical reconstructions were strongly informed by his personal visual experience of sailing through the Raja Ampat islands and around the New Guinea coastlines in the course of his colonial administrative duties.