The wider world arrived early here. In January 1778 the ships of Captain James Cook made the first European landfall in all of Hawaiʻi at Waimea, on Kauaʻi's west side — a meeting that opened the islands to trade and, with it, to introduced diseases that would devastate the Hawaiian population in the generations that followed. A brief Russian trading venture left the star-shaped lava-rock walls of Fort Elizabeth at Waimea in 1816, and Protestant missionaries came ashore at the same town in 1820. Each left a mark, but none unseated the Hawaiian world that had been here for centuries.
Kauaʻi holds a place apart in Hawaiian history: it is the one main island King Kamehameha never took by force. Twice he massed great fleets to invade across the channel, and twice he was turned back — once by a storm, once by an epidemic that swept his army. In 1810, rather than face another war, Kauaʻi's ruling chief, King Kaumualiʻi, negotiated a peaceful agreement that brought the island into the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi while he continued to govern it. The story of the island that was joined by agreement, never conquered, is still a point of Kauaian pride.
Why People Visit Kauaʻi
People come to Kauaʻi for the oldest, greenest island in the chain and the quieter pace that comes with it. It rewards travelers who would rather hike a canyon rim or paddle a north-shore bay than chase a crowd — a place of waterfalls, taro valleys, and emerald cliffs, with a deep Hawaiian history and a slower, garden kind of aloha.
