Nigel Statham graduated BA in General Linguistics and Indonesian Languages (Australian National University), BTh (Hons), PhD (Melbourne) and studied field linguistics with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Statham was for 40 years a translator and translation consultant in Pacific Island languages, and is fluent in Tongan. He was the general editor of the first Tongan Monolingual Dictionary (19,000 entries). His translations into Tongan include the explorers' accounts of their visits to Tonga from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the present work ('Mariner's Tonga') and George Vason's narrative of four years in Tonga. He also undertook the digitisation and editing of the diary of Rev. John Thomas, the pioneer missionary to Tonga, and a previously unpublished history of Tonga by Rev. E. E. Collocott, a later missionary.
Ian C. Campbell graduated from the Universities of New England (BA (Hons)) and Adelaide (PhD). He was formerly Professor of History & Politics at the multinational University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and is the author of Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands, Island Kingdom: Tonga Ancient and Modern, and Tonga's Path to Democracy, among other works, as well as numerous journal articles, book chapters and encyclopaedia entries on Tongan and other Pacific Islands topics.