What was the strongest and biggest hurricane is history?

You might take a look at some of the links here:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/whhistry.htm

They list strongest, deadliest, costliest and a few other tables. Many of the entries have links to stories on the specific storms.

At the turn of the last century Galveston, Texas was a sophisticated seaport of 38,000 people, a city prosperous from the cotton trade and richer in millionaires than even Newport, R.I. It was the first city in Texas with phones and electricity, and its residents enjoyed a grand lifestyle: an opera house, 50 miles of streetcar track and foreign consulates for 19 countries.

On Friday evening, Sept. 7, 1900, many of the residents of Galveston were settling down to dinner, few if any of them concerned about the steady 15 mph northerly wind rattling their windows. Within 48 hours, at least 8,000 of the townspeople --almost one in five Galvestonians -- would be dead, victims of the single worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

The tragedy killed more Americans than the legendary Johnstown Flood, the San Francisco Earthquake, the 1938 New England Hurricane and the Great Chicago Fire combined.

Lots of links about it here.

It may not have been the biggest hurricane in history, but tropical cyclone Mahina that hit Bathurst Bay in northern Australia in 1899 was pretty spectacular. It was a category 5 at landfall and was accompanied by a storm surge officially recognised to be 42 feet in depth, although the bodies of fish and dolphins were reportedly found on top of 50 foot cliffs. Everyone and everything was destroyed for a distance of several miles inland. This included the settlement of Bathurst Bay and 152 ships. 400 European Australians and an unknown number of Aboriginal Australians living in the surrounding country side. This was the worst natural disaster in Australia's history and would have been significantly worse if the area was heavily inhabited. It is probably worth noting that the primary means of destruction available to hurricanes/cyclones/typhoons is the storm surge. By comparison Hurricane Katrina produced a storm surge that I have seen variously estimated at between 18 and 27 feet. The nature and depth of these surges is dependent on all sorts of factors, like the shape of the coast relative to the direction of the storm, if the tide is moving in or out, etc, etc. Periodically, several hundred thousand people lose their lives to storm surges in Bangladesh by simple virtue of the fact that there is no high ground anywhere.
Two government website links are attached. One American, one Australian.

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E3.html
http://www.ema.gov.au/ema/emadisasters.nsf/83edbd0553620d8cca256d09001fc8fd/40e758f025b7a858ca256d3300057cd3?OpenDocument