KEY POINTS:
Clement Wragge, head of the weather office, had read the signs. Even though he was in Brisbane, 3000km away, he knew what lay in store.
He sent an urgent telegram to Thursday Island, at the tip of Cape York, warning of a "tropical disturbance", and issued an alert to shipping in the area.
Within a day, what he found had built up to become one of the deadliest storms in history.
Wragge, an eccentric who later settled in Birkenhead, Auckland, and set up a famous tropical garden, called the cyclone Mahina, a Tahitian girl's name.
"Mothers will agree," he wrote, "that no infant daughter can bear a softer or prettier name."
But Mahina was a brute of a storm, Australia's worst civilian maritime disaster. After it had laid waste a fleet moored in Bathurst Bay, a rough pearling settlement beside Cape Melville, more than 300 lives had been lost.
The final toll from the cyclone, which struck at night on March 4, 1899, reached about 400, including Aborigines who drowned when a great storm surge roared ashore through coastal forests, sucking petrified families back to sea.
An account of the terrifying storm is related in The Devil's Eye, a novel by Brisbane journalist Ian Townsend. His book has strong links with New Zealand - one of its central characters is Captain William Field Porter, skipper of Crest of the Wave, a 112-tonne schooner which serviced the Queensland pearl trade.
Porter, grandson of William Field Porter the 2nd, an MP in the first New Zealand Parliament, was anchored in Bathurst Bay when Mahina roared ashore. On board the Crest were his wife Maggie and their young daughter Alice. Maggie, too, was a New Zealander, from Wellington.
The origins of the Crest are not clear, but Townsend thinks the vessel was built in New Zealand. Its survival is testimony to the shipbuilding trade and to the skills of Porter, who kept his ship afloat while around him the pearling fleet perished.
Using contemporary accounts, Townsend reconstructs the fearful period when the storm hit with terrible ferocity.
"The schooner twisted in its agony, water springing in fountains from the walls. When the lantern went out, Maggie imagined that they were plunging to the bottom to be crushed."
At one point Porter, sensing all is lost, descends from the deck to kiss his family goodbye. He finds his wife standing in rising seawater, clutching their child: "We'll be right," the unsmiling captain tells the disbelieving Maggie.
In his research, Townsend found a letter Porter wrote to his parents in Grafton, Auckland, two days after the cyclone, when the exhausted captain had finally plugged the holes in his ship. "Bodies," he wrote, "have been going past all day."
An indication of Mahina's awesome power became clear on March 5. Of the fleet at anchor in Bathurst Bay that fateful night, 150 vessels sank or were wrecked. Some were tossed 5km inland on the storm surge that reports put at 14.6m high. The surge was partly generated by extremely low pressure in the eye of the cyclone which caused the sea level to rise.
The wall of water swamped a camp set up on a ridge above the bay by Constable Jack Kenny of the Native Mounted Police. Because Kenny was a policeman, his account was accepted and entered the history books, with reports of fish and dolphins stranded 15m up cliffs and rocks embedded in trees.
The claims are disputed by Queensland scientists, who say there is no evidence of any marine debris on surrounding high points. But Townsend says the toll from the category five cyclone - the highest - confirms it was a phenomenal storm.
The book sheds light on the little-known pearling industry, a dangerous and uncertain business which cost the lives of unwary sailors and made fortunes for others. The attraction was clear: a perfect pearl was worth hundreds of pounds.
The lure drew divers from afar - the Bathurst Bay memorial to Mahina's victims lists pearlers from Ceylon, India, Japan, Java, Borneo, the South Sea Islands, the Philippines and New Zealander Jim Maraonoa, of whom little is known.
Dressed in ungainly canvas suits and protected by a bell helmet, the pearlers walked the sea floor gathering oysters. Air was delivered by a tube from the lugger on the surface.
A lifeline tethered them to the boat and could drag divers quickly to the surface if crocodiles came too close. The suits enabled pearlers to go deeper and stay below longer than the earlier surface divers - they had to, because shell had disappeared vanished from shallow waters.
"By 1899 they had adopted this new technique of having a big mother ship, the schooners, with fleets of, say, 12 to 16 luggers each," says Townsend.
"Each lugger had a diver and each diver had one of these suits. On the deck, two men manned a hand pump and had to turn it to force the air down to the diver. The tender took care of the hose and guided the lugger and the man below.
"Someone steered, and there was a cook. So each lugger in those days had, say, six or seven men."
Apart from the memorial, little evidence remains in Bathurst Bay of the catastrophic storm. The wrecked wooden vessels have long since rotted.
Local Aborigines have a legend about The Wind, which they believe lives on cliffs and islands and gets upset during the wet season.
* The Devil's Eye, by Ian Townsend, (HarperCollins) $29.99.
