On a mild spring day in May, 1862, William Ward took his five sisters sailing off the Toronto Islands.

Only he returned alive.

“I had run the sheet through the rail of the gunwale,” Ward, whose family gave Ward Island its name, later recalled in a story from Star Weekly in 1912.

“A puff of wind struck us and the rope jammed. The boat upset and threw us all into the bay.”

Ward managed to right the boat and pull his sisters back on when another squall tipped them out again. Unable to swim, and held down by their dresses, the sisters drowned. Only Ward was rescued.

The traumatic experience and the guilt that followed pushed Ward to a life dedicated to saving others. He was the captain of the Dominion Lifesaving crew and was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s silver medal for a particularly heroic rescue with Robert Berry, an oarsmen and boxer.

In total, Ward is credited for saving more than 160 lives from Toronto Harbour.

The tale of Ward’s fateful sailing excursion was recently shared on a Reddit page of “random Toronto facts most people wouldn’t know about.”

“William’s story is very much a human story,” said Jane Fairburn, who wrote “Along the Shore” a book about Toronto’s waterfront heritage. “His resilience was remarkable in the face of what had happened with the drowning of many members of his family.

“William Ward he was a true Toronto hero, he truly was,” she added.

Ward’s story is not just about him, it’s about Toronto, Fairburn said.

“The Ward family is an important one because they spanned all these various periods of the islands’ history and Toronto’s history, to an extent,” Fairburn said. “They’ve seen this great transition that we’ve gone through as part of the colonial backwater right through to the great modern city of Toronto that we know today. They’ve been there for the whole transition, that’s quite unusual.”

Ward was born in 1847 and the son of English fisherman David Ward, who came to Canada in 1830 and settled on what would eventually become known as Ward Island.

Back then, the islands were very isolated and desolate. It wasn’t until the 1880s that they became known as a resort town in the summer.

Though most of the Wards have moved off the islands, many of them still have fond memories of growing up there.

At almost 75 years old, Frank Ward, the great-grandson of William Ward, remembers a lively childhood there. The islands are where he met both his wives. His second wife was a summer resident on the island.

“There was everything for children and adults as well they had summer camp for the kids, the residents,” he said from Collingwood, where he now lives. “It was super, just great.”

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Ward, also a champion oarsman and at one point the single skiff champion of America, died on Jan. 25, 1912, of stomach cancer. He was 65.