History of Kauai
As it always does, it began as water. Nothing else. Just watery vastness. Then, from the very core of the earth, came the foundations for this string of magical islands that we know as Hawaii. Fiery, molten lava. After millions of years of building from the ocean's floor, they poked out of the ocean and rose into the world. And the first to emerge was the northern-most, Kauai.

From afar, storm-shuttled birds came, dropping seeds from elsewhere, which grew and eventually evolved into native species, as did they. The sea brought everything else. Remote, lonely and splendid, the island of Kauai took on the shape which we might recognize today.

Then, from islands far to the south, somewhere in the Marquesas Islands, came Polynesians seeking a new life. Crossing the unbelievably vast ocean, making perhaps history's greatest voyage, as daring in its own way as taking a rocket to the moon, they sailed using celestial navigation centuries before the Europeans would discover it and ventured into the open seas.

The first landing? Kauai. They found an uninhabited chunk of land, a temperate climate and freedom from the restrictions of their old islands. They thrived and began a long tradition of migration, going back to their own home to bring more and more of their people to Hawaii. They built new traditions, began a new culture, started from scratch to achieve a very high order of civilization.

But their isolation couldn't last. After some twelve centuries of being alone on the most remote islands on earth, a British sea captain, James Cook, made land on Kauai, the first Hawaiian island he sighted. The story is well-known. Conflict with the native Hawaiians led to his untimely death. But the ali'i, Hawaii's ruling class, began to understand the threat from a world they had not know before.

After meeting Cook, Kamehameha the Great was determined to conquer all of the Hawaiian islands in order to unify them and make them strong against the on-rush of foreigners he knew was coming. Swiftly moving through the islands from his base on the island of Hawaii, the Big Island, he was able to tuck everything except Kauai under his powerful wing. But Kauai would not bend. Only through treaty did it become a part of the Hawaiian nation.

A  haole (foreigner) named Robert Wyllie, a Scotsman, would prove sufficiently valuable to Kamehameha's royal heirs that he was given an expansive estate on Kauai's northern shore where he began to raise cattle. In honor of a child prince who visited in 1860 with his parents, Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, Wyllie rechristened the green, grassy bluffs along the ocean, Princeville. Today, the name refers to the area which includes the beautiful Hanalei Bay Resort.