Destination Information - Kauai, Hawaii, USA

While Kauai's reputation as home to the wettest spot on Earth — Mount Wai'ale'ale, averaging 485 inches of rain per year — has lead to its popular designation as "The Garden Isle," the island has another, older name: "The Separate Kingdom."

In part this is because Kauai may have been the first of the Hawaiian Islands to be settled by Marquesan seafarers, somewhere around 750 A.D. Combined with its remoteness from the rest of the island chain, this may also have led to the belief that Kauai's royal bloodline was the purest in the Islands. Kauai was also the only island in the chain to withstand the army of Kamehameha the Great as he swept through the rest of the archipelago in the late 1700s, on his quest to unify Hawaii under one king. (Kamehameha would eventually have his way, however, when Kauai's chief Kaumuali'i peacefully ceded authority over his island to the king in 1810.)

Kauai was the first Hawaiian Island English explorer Capt. James Cook stumbled upon in 1778, while sailing from Tahiti toward North America. While it has long been believed that Cook was the first European to set foot in the Islands — he first did so at Waimea, on Kauai's southwest coast — recent evidence has some historians claiming that Spanish sailors may have visited the Islands more than a century earlier.