The Cataraqui was an 802-ton barque built in 1840 at Quebec, her name borrowed from "Katerokwi," the Mississauga word for the place now called Kingston, Ontario. Registered at Liverpool by Smith and Sons, she was fitted out to carry assisted emigrants, ordinary working families lured by the promise of land and wages in a colony desperate for people. When she sailed on 20 April 1845 under Captain Christopher Finlay, her manifest listed 369 emigrants and 41 crew. These were not adventurers. They were labourers, wives, children, whole households who had sold what little they owned to gamble everything on Australia. They had no way of knowing that the most dangerous miles of the entire journey lay in its final hours.

Bass Strait is a graveyard, a shallow, storm-funnelling gap between two landmasses, and that night it earned the reputation. The Cataraqui drove onto jagged rocks roughly 140 metres offshore near Fitzmaurice Bay. There was no gentle grounding, only a ship pinned in the surf as wave after wave swept the decks. People were torn into the water in the dark, unable to see the shore so close at hand. Eight crewmen clawed their way to land on floating wreckage, where they found the single surviving passenger, a man named Solomon Brown. Everyone else, the families, the newborns, the captain, was gone. Nearly four hundred people drowned within a stone's throw of the coast they had crossed an ocean to reach.

The nine survivors were not alone for long. David Howie, a former convict living on the island, found them after spotting wreckage in the water. His own boat was wrecked too, so he could not carry them to safety, but he sheltered and fed them through the weeks that followed. He also took on a task almost beyond imagining: gathering and burying the bodies the sea returned. Howie eventually laid more than 340 dead to rest in a series of mass graves above the beach. For five weeks the small band waited until the cutter Midge finally appeared and carried them to Melbourne. The colonial government later rewarded Howie for what he had done, though no reward could match the grim weight of it.

Loss on this scale forced change. The Cataraqui was one reason the Cape Otway lighthouse was built on the Victorian mainland, and the sinking of this very ship prompted the construction in 1861 of the Cape Wickham lighthouse at King Island's northern tip, at 48 metres still Australia's tallest. On the island itself, the dead were not forgotten. An iron memorial tablet was raised near the wreck in 1846; when it rusted away, a stone cairn replaced it in 1956. Today five mass graves and more than forty individual ones mark the coast, and a plaque at the Tasmanian Seafarers' Memorial at Triabunna keeps the names in memory. King Island has known more than sixty wrecks and over two thousand lost lives, but none cut as deep as the night the Cataraqui went down.