Jan Sneep (died 16 January 2016 in
Voorschoten
Voorschoten () is a town and municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. It is a smaller town in the Randstad, enclosed by the cities of Leiden, Wassenaar and Leidschendam-Voorburg. The municipality covers an area ...
) was a Dutch civil servant and adventurer, best known for the 7-month, thousand-mile Franco-Dutch expedition across what was then
Netherlands New Guinea
Dutch New Guinea or Netherlands New Guinea (, ) was the Western New Guinea, western half of the island of New Guinea that was a part of the Dutch East Indies until 1949, later an overseas administrative territorial entity, overseas territory of ...
, led by
Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau.
Sneep was a civil servant working for the Dutch colonial government in a little village in the
Sibil Valley. He spoke
Malay and a few hundred words of
Sibil, and was adept at making contact with inland tribes. In 1958 he had made the Sibil Valley an official Dutch outpost, and in 1959 he joined the expedition that mapped the
Star Mountains
The Star Mountains ( Dutch ( colonial)'': Sterrengebergte''; Indonesian'': Pegunungan Bintang'') are a mountain range in eastern end of Highland Papua, Indonesia and the western Papua New Guinea, stretching from the eastern end of Indonesia t ...
, until then a white spot on the map.
In 1959, he joined the French-Dutch expedition that crossed the island from south to north, across its central mountains. That expedition, whose account is the subject of the documentary film ''
Sky Above and Mud Beneath'', found the source of what they called the
Princess Marijke River (after
Princess Christina of the Netherlands
Princess Christina of the Netherlands (Maria Christina; 18 February 1947 – 16 August 2019) was the youngest of four daughters of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld. She taught singing in New York and was ...
), (which they followed as much as possible to descend from the mountains. Sneep got sick with
yellow fever in February 1960, during the second leg of the expedition. After the expedition he moved back to the Netherlands, never to return to Papua; he said that seeing the people again, after the handover to Indonesia, would make him "too sad". He died aged 81 in
Voorschoten
Voorschoten () is a town and municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. It is a smaller town in the Randstad, enclosed by the cities of Leiden, Wassenaar and Leidschendam-Voorburg. The municipality covers an area ...
, on 16 January 2016.
Sneep authored ''Einde van het stenen tijdperk'' ("End of the stone age") about his years in New Guinea (Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2005 ISBN 9051709277).
References
External links
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{{morecat, date=April 2022
2016 deaths
category:Geography of New Guinea