a pictures worth a thousand words

[13Echo70271]

could a po have started with a black/white pos/neg system and only changed the white wire (incorrectly) to red? some boats have been wired that way blk=pos , wht = neg .
electricians show those types of changes with the correct color tape on the last few inches of each end of a single line to prevent mix-ups. My v20 came to me with a bunch of that orange wire also. It took a while to trace all.