Mont Blanc Cricket

Blond and powerfully built, Cricket is a man in his forties who sports the same chestnut-shaped growth on his head that his ancestor Noland once carried. He goes about shirtless and barefoot owing to his endless diving, wears dark-purple tracksuit trousers striped in white with a rope for a belt, and usually keeps a cigarette in his mouth. His left arm carries a tattoo of a chestnut labeled Maroon. Two decades earlier he wore a short beard, and after the timeskip he adds an open dress shirt, a captain's coat slung from his shoulders, and a fuller beard along his jawline.

Cricket is stubborn and fiercely determined, cheerful in a quieter way than his famous forebear. He holds that people should chase their dreams no matter who laughs, and he chuckled warmly when Luffy insisted a sky island was real. He treats the alliance's two captains, Masira and Shoujou, as surrogate sons and leaps to their defense. The shame heaped on his family over Noland's reputation as a liar weighed on him for years and pushed him out to sea, yet once he learned the golden city truly existed he made peace with that legacy and turned toward fresh ambitions.

Mocked since childhood for his ancestor's disgrace, Cricket fled home and captained his own pirate crew, less out of ambition than to escape the Mont Blanc name. Roughly ten years before the story he stumbled onto Jaya, the very island bound up in Noland's tale of gold, and chose to stay and settle the matter once and for all; his crew refused and abandoned him there. Living alone in a house by the cape, he dove the surrounding waters over and over in search of the lost city, a diving talent inherited from Noland that steadily wore down his body. Years later Masira and Shoujou appointed themselves his followers, and the three formed the Saruyama Alliance. When Luffy surfaced near his dive site, Cricket first mistook the crew for thieves and brawled with Sanji, even drawing a flintlock, before decompression sickness dropped him. After the Straw Hats nursed him back, he shared Noland's logbook and explained how the Knock-Up Stream and a captured South Bird could carry them to Skypiea. The Bellamy Pirates then ambushed him and made off with his hard-won gold, which Luffy retrieved. Once the Straw Hats rode the stream skyward, Cricket and the alliance heard the Golden Bell of Shandora ring out, proof that the city of gold had been in the sky all along, and he wept with joy before setting off after a new dream.