Maelstrom Spider Pirates

Headed by Squard, this band serves beneath the Whitebeard Pirates as one of their allied crews. Their emblem depicts a spider whose lower body trails into a spiral, likely evoking a whirlpool, with the front two legs raised as though reaching out. Squard wears that same mark inked across his forehead. Having earned his captain a name in the New World, the crew is presumed to be strong by the time of the great war.

The crew sails a vessel named the Real Spider, though its design has never been shown and it may not even have been the ship used during the Marineford war, where they were only seen aboard one of Whitebeard's craft. The crew's roots are tragic: more than twenty-four years earlier an earlier version of the Maelstrom Spider Pirates was slaughtered by Gol D. Roger, leaving Squard as the sole survivor. That loss bred a bitter hatred for the Pirate King, until Whitebeard took the grieving man in as a son and gave him the confidence to assemble a new crew.

Squard is the crew's heart and the focus of its story. At Marineford his crew stood among forty-three New World outfits backing Whitebeard against the Marines. Admiral Akainu deceived Squard into believing Whitebeard had sold out his allies, and in a rage Squard stabbed his adoptive father. Whitebeard forgave him all the same, breaking him down in tears, and on Marco's urging the crew fought on for their captain's sake. They later tried to seize a paddleboat to cover the Whitebeard Pirates' escape, were ordered to retreat instead, and wept when Whitebeard fell to the Blackbeard Pirates.