Higuma Bandits

Across Dawn Island's uplands, Higuma commanded these outlaws as their chief while an 8,000,000 Berry bounty hung over his head, a sum that towered over the East Blue average near 3,000,000. He struck an imposing shape: towering and darkly tanned, his hair black, his chin bearded, and a scar in the form of an X cut above the right eye. Draping his frame was a long crimson coat pulled over a white shirt, joined by black trousers and a golden chain.

Judging by the manga's fullest crowd panel, no fewer than fifteen men followed him. The gang made its home inland and had scarcely any dealings with the ocean, an ignorance that would ultimately doom their leader. By his own boast, Higuma had ended fifty-six lives, a tally he flaunted to frighten others.

Swagger and cruelty shaped the leader and, through him, the whole gang. Higuma relished grinding down the helpless and would just as soon threaten a child, yet in the manner of most loudmouths he fell apart the instant genuine danger loomed. A lifetime spent far from the coast bred contempt for pirates in him, and he tarred the Red Hair Pirates as gutless once Shanks refused to answer his jeering. For emergencies he kept a smoke bomb handy, figuring nobody would go looking for a mountain thug hiding out at sea.

He bore a sword yet never displayed any true skill with it, waving the weapon around solely to menace. When the Red Hair Pirates at last responded to his provocation, their power dismantled his underlings with contemptuous ease, and both Lucky Roux and Benn Beckman laid bare just how far beyond him they stood. The gang's fearsome name rested on head count and savagery, never on any real martial ability.

Higuma stood as the group's only named figure and its guiding will. He marched his men into Foosha Village in search of drink and tangled with the Red Hair Pirates at Partys Bar, cracking a bottle over Shanks and tipping a shelf of liquor onto him before stalking off in disdain. Days on, once the crew had put out to sea, he came back and loudly mocked the absent Shanks, which drove the seven-year-old Luffy, only a small child then, to swing at the bandits for his hero's sake.

On finding Luffy's rubbery frame, Higuma toyed with the idea of selling him to a circus, waved away the mayor's plea for the boy, and readied to slay him just as the pirates returned. Beaten, he triggered his smoke bomb and made off by dinghy with Luffy as a captive, then booted the boy into the waves. The disturbance summoned the Lord of the Coast, the sea beast haunting Foosha's waters, which gulped Higuma down whole. His demise moved Shanks to sacrifice an arm rescuing Luffy, planting in the boy the resolve to one day claim the title of Pirate King.