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Disaster at sea has long constituted a prominent aesthetic trope, a singular site of meaning in the history of Western cultural representation. Broad historical developments in the visual depiction of shipwreck and its reception can be seen as indicative of a shifting field of social and cultural meanings, narrating the moral assumptions underpinning the spectacle of the imperiled seafarer, and of the suffering human more generally. [...] My thesis in this chapter is that the shipwreck image's moral meaning operates through perspective and spectatorship, elements which are productive of the perceived distance of the spectator from the depicted suffering, both spatial and emotive. In order to engage with this problematic, it is necessary to ask where we locate the viewing subject - the spectator's position both in relation to the depicted scene, and to the spectator within the artwork. How do we place the human in these artworks: those the image depicts, both sufferers and spectators; the artist; and the viewer, both real and assumed. Within the nexus linking the spectator, the depicted subject, and the creator of the image, is produced not only the image's meaning, but an affective response around which the ethical content of the shipwreck artwork is constituted. In exploring this theme, I rehearse a number of very familiar positions in the historical canon of shipwreck art. However, foregrounding the moral implications of the formal characteristics of these paintings - spectatorship, perspective, realism - and their place in the artwork's reception (particularly in relation to their affective resonances), and exploring the considerable continuities and discontinuities in this discourse, offers new perspectives on the moral landscape - or indeed seascape - of the modern age.
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