However, the earliest actual evidence for a Viking raid is not textual at all, but archaeological. Crucially, considering that it predates the Lindisfarne attack by more than forty years, it does not come from the West and the British Isles, but from the East, and the Baltic. Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up parallel to the water some forty metres apart on an isthmus, at a strategic point where ships would pass. The graves would have been a visible landmark—they were intended to be seen, and remembered. Before the excavation of the Salme find, the largest number of bodies previously known from a Viking boat burial was four, arguably five. The first of the Salme vessels, the smaller of the two, contained the corpses of seven men; astonishingly, the second Salme ship contained no fewer than thirty-four bodies.