Thanks, Luc, for amplifying.
It’s amazing how erroneous ideas about helm orders, and Titanic’s in particular, persist. There were many people who believed that Titanic’s wheel was backward—top spoke to starboard turned to port—and was a cause of the accident.
Even Kit Bonner, who was technical advisor to James Cameron, perpetuates the myth in his book Great Ship Disasters: “First Officer Murdoch reversed the wing engines full back, stopped the turbine engine, and had the pilothouse wheel turned to starboard, which turned the ship to port and away from the iceberg.†No wonder folks are confused.
Although it’s probable that there was no “right†action that would have saved Titanic after the berg was sighted, Murdoch did panic, and by reversing the wing engines, lessened Titanic’s chances of turning enough to miss the berg.
As Luc’s reference explains, the helm order given by the Sailing Master remained, from the days of the tiller, independent of what the helmsman actually did to implement it. This allowed the Sailing Master to not change his thinking depending on whether the vessel had a tiller, whipstaff, or wheel.
In fact early wheels could be either way depending on whether the builder decided to make the top spoke act as a tiller or as a whipstaff.
On 21 August 1935 the US Congress passed the Helm Order Act, which outlawed the use of Port & Starboard in helm orders. Orders must take the form Right…rudder, or Left…rudder. Most other countries did likewise at that time.