The Blade of Safavid

I’m certain nobody really cares about some of the throw away characters that I casually include in my stories. Well known authors and editors proclaim loudly I shouldn’t include too much historical backstory

Think of a privateer as a legitimized pirate, legally-sanctioned by a simple contract from a sponsoring government. The contract was usually in the form of a Letter of Marque.
The privateer was typically

Obviously the world of medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was much different than it is today. And aboard a pirate ship three hundred years ago you might guess it was different then