James Lyle Young (1849-1929) was born in Londonderry (Derry), Ireland, and went to Australia with his parents in the mid-1850's. After working in Australia as a station hand, Young, in 1870, went to Fiji where he was associated with a cotton-planting venture at Taveuni. In 1875, he left Fiji on a trading voyage to Samoa, and from May, 1876, to October, 1881, he worked as a trader in the Marshall, Mariana and Caroline Islands. In 1882, Young went to Tahiti to become manager of the Papeete trading store of Andrew Crawford & Co., of San Francisco. In 1888, he went into business in Tahiti on his own account. He was closely associated with the Pacific Islands for the rest of his life, as managing director of S.R. Maxwell & Co., of Tahiti, and owner of Henderson and Macfarlane Ltd., of Auckland. He became recognised as an authority on the life and culture of the region.

Charles Morris Woodford was born in 1852 and educated at Tonbridge School in England. He settled in Suva about 1882 and from Fiji visited Kiribati (the Gilbert Islands group), as Government agent on the ketch Patience. In 1886, as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society he made the first of three successive explorations of the Solomon Islands, especially Guadalcanal, where he was the first white man to penetrate the interior to any distance, collecting natural history specimens for the British Museum. His experiences are described in his book A Naturalist Among Headhunters (1890). In 1895 Woodford became Acting Consul and Deputy Commissioner at Samoa, and in the following year, a part of the Solomon Group having been made a British Protectorate, he was appointed the first Resident Commissioner, a post which he retained until his retirement in 1914. His later years were spent in Sussex.
Woodford contributed an account of his visit to the Gilbert Islands to The Geographical Journal in 1895, and a note on Ontong Java in 1909. In 1916 he read a paper to the Royal Geographical Society on Polynesian settlements in the Solomon Islands, published in the Journal in 1926. Woodford helped elucidate the narratives of Mandaña’s discovery of the Solomon Islands by identifying places visited by the Spaniards and taking photographs for inclusion in the Hakluyt Society publications. He also published papers in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, of which he was a Fellow.
From The Geographical Journal, 1928, pp.206-207.

Reverend John Williams (1796-1839) went to Tahiti (French Polynesia) as a missionary for the London Missionary Society in 1816. He was active in the Society, Hervey, Southern Cook and Samoan Islands. In 1839, he moved to Fasitoouta, Upolu, in Samoa and established a station there. On 20 November 1839, he was killed at Erromango, New Hebrides (Vanuatu), along with another LMS missionary James Harris.