Why do sailors say 'port' and 'starboard', for 'left' and 'right'?

Sitting at one of the starboard yardarms on board the Parma by Alan Vickers, 1932. The Parma was a 3091 ton steel four-masted barque built at Port Glasgow in 1902. Captain Ruben de Cloux and Villiers bought the vessel in 1931. Repro ID: N61670. Copyright: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London At sea, an

emergency can happen at any time, and it is vital that everything aboard can be clearly identified and described. Where left and right could lead to confusion, port and starboard are perfectly clear and unambiguous to a seafarer.

Starboard
Boats developed from simple dugout canoes. When the paddler steering a canoe is right handed (and the majority of people are right-handed), he or she naturally steers over the right-hand side (looking forward) of the boat. As canoes developed into larger vessels, the steering paddle grew larger and developed into a broad-bladed oar, held vertically in the water and permanently fixed to the side of the boat by a flexible lashing or a built-in moveable swivel. The seagoing ships of maritime Northern Europe all featured this side-hung rudder, always on the right hand side of the ship. This rudder (in Anglo-Saxon the steorbord) was further developed in medieval times into the more familiar apparatus fixed to the sternpost, but starboard remains in the language to describe anything to the right of a ships centreline when viewed from aft.

Port

If starboard is the right-hand side of the vessel, looking forward from aft, the left-hand side is port at least, it is now! In Old English, the term was bcbord (in modern German Backbord and French bbord), perhaps because the helmsman at the steorbord had his back to the ships left-hand side. This did not survive into Medieval and later English, when larboard was used. Possibly this term is derived from laddebord, meaning loading side; the side rudder (steorbord) would be vulnerable to damage if it went alongside a quay, so early ships would have been loaded (laded) with the side against the quay. In time laddebord became larboard as steorbord became starboard. Even so, from an early date port was sometimes used as the opposite for starboard when giving steering orders, perhaps deriving from the loading port which was in the larboard side. However, it was only from the mid-19th century that, according to Admiral Smyths The Sailors Word Book, published in 1867, the left side of the ship is called port, by Admiralty Order, in preference to larboard, as less mistakeable in sound for starboard

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

The origin of the term starbord comes from early boating practices. Before ships had rudders on their centrelines, they were steered by use of a specialised oar. This oar was held by an oarsman located in the stern (back) of the ship. However, like most of the rest of society, there were many more right-handed sailors than left-handed sailors. This meant that the steering oar (which had been broadened to provide better control) used to be affixed to the right side of the ship. The word starboard comes from Old English steorbord, literally meaning the side on which the ship is steered, descendant from the Old Norse words stri meaning rudder (from the verb stra, literally being at the helm, having a hand in) and bor meaning etymologically board, then the side of a ship.