Mont Blanc Noland

Towering and powerfully built, Noland had tan skin, a rounded nose, and chestnut-brown hair, crowned by an odd chestnut-shaped growth that his descendants would later inherit too. His everyday look ran to a high-collared dark coat held shut by a belt, an orange scarf, and striped blue-and-white trousers above ordinary shoes. Concealed under the coat hung an orange sash dressed with medal-like pendants, while a katana sat at his left hip and a broad cross-shaped scar marked the left of his chest.

Once he had been executed, shame warped how the centuries remembered him. Over time his likeness curdled into that of an everlastingly grinning fool with a spork-shaped nose, and it is this mocking version, not the real man, that illustrators went on to draw in storybooks for children.

Steady in the face of peril and difficult to rattle, Noland paired an adventurer's nerve with real warmth. He held the idea of progress above almost all else and could not stomach the thought of anyone enduring a hardship that already had a known remedy. That principle threw him into conflict with the Shandia, whose ritual of human sacrifice to cure Tree Fever struck him as a slap to everyone who had toiled across decades to find the actual treatment. He never flatly denied that the tribe's gods existed, yet he insisted it was wrong to court them with sacrifice when a tested cure lay at hand.

His firmness could tip into rashness. He cut down the serpent the Shandia revered before ever trying to reason with them, and afterward he razed their infected trees with no warning, giving deep offense a second time. Owning that he had overreached, he sought to make peace by refusing to carry off any of their gold. A faithful servant who never once defied his king or the World Government, Noland met his unjust sentence without struggle, only laying out the facts as he understood them. As the blade waited for him, his mind held just one concern: whether his friend Kalgara had come through unharmed.

Noland came into the world in the Lvneel Kingdom 453 years before the present and rose to lead an expedition crew as its admiral, completing two month-long Grand Line voyages before launching a third. An earlier trip had carried him to Green Bit, home of the Tontatta Tribe, where he lent the dwarves a hand in driving off those who tormented them. During the third expedition his vessel, worn down and starving, drifted toward the sound of a bell that guided him to Jaya. On the island he came upon people wracked by Tree Fever and discovered that the Shandia intended to give over a young woman, Mousse, to the serpent god Kashigami in exchange for healing. Noland struck the snake's head off just as it was about to swallow her, telling the gathered tribe that no one needed to die.

Marked at once as an enemy, he was still allowed time by the chief to produce a cure, with his crew kept as hostages against his failure. Caught in a crevice when an earthquake split the ground, he won the warrior Kalgara over by explaining how the remedy worked, and from there the two forged a close bond. That friendship cracked when Noland's men felled the tribe's sacred Ancestor Trees, though the Shandia pardoned him once they grasped his motives. Years on, he sailed back to Jaya alongside his greed-driven king, only to find the land vanished. Certain he had lied, the king condemned him to death, and a planted false witness doomed him before a jeering crowd. In truth the tribe along with their entire city had been flung into the sky by a Knock Up Stream, a fact confirmed long afterward when the Golden Bell sounded once more, clearing Noland's name at last.