In the film Titanic, in order to go to the left (port) around the iceberg the helm is ordered to starboard. This was because, in those days, that’s just how it was done. My guess is that it comes from when you had a tillar bar instead of a wheel, to go left you’d push it to the right.
Anyways, what I was wondering is when exactly was the switch made to steering a ship’s wheel like a car’s? Was there an “international turn the wheel the other way” day? Did it cause any collisions?
The order “hard a-starboard” is, as you suspected, a throwback to the days of the tiller. The wheel began replacing the whipstaff (a jointed tiller mounted vertically) near the beginning of the eighteenth century. Commands for standard maneuvering adapted to the wheel and began to be issued to “come left” or “steer to port”. Since wheels did not replace whipstaffs all at once, the transition in commands came about gradually. However, the “panic” commands, to be ordered in extreme cases, did not change at all, so that ordering a ship to turn left, suddenly, was ordered by (the ancient tiller command) “hard a-starboard”.
Tom~
Soon afterwards, Deimos simply vanished from the sky.
This bugged me for a while too, especially when it was brought up in the “worst film mistakes” thread. The link below explains the tiller, whipstaff, wheel, history of steering commands and has a whole lot of other Titanic stuff besides.
http://users.senet.com.au/~gittins/wheel.html