Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold

Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold is a comic book starring Donald Duck that was originally printed in Four Color #9 (the first Donald Duck Four Color) in October 1942. In this story Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie meet a parrot named Yellow Beak and they wind up searching for the lost treasure of Henry Morgan. Unfortunately for them Black Pete wants the treasure too.

The script was by Bob Karp and illustrated by Carl Barks and Jack Hannah. This story introduced the comic book personalities of Donald Duck and his nephews.

The storyline was originally developed for a Mickey Mouse feature cartoon (under the title "Morgan's Ghost") in which Mickey, Donald, and Goofy meet Yellow Beak and encounter Pete, but the cartoon was never produced. Disney historian Jim Korkis reports the notion of taking the unmade feature and adapting the storyline for publication as a comic book occurred when Dell Comics editor Oskar Lebeck "was given permission to look through the Disney files of cartoon ideas that were shelved. He found the over 800 numbered sketches for "Morgan's Ghost" and was instantly struck that most of the work had already been done in terms of visualizing the story. Lebeck felt it could easily be adapted into a Donald Duck comic book story." Hannah recalled John Clarke Rose, Story Research Director at the Disney Studio, "... took us to meet Eleanor Packer who I believe was in charge of Whitman/Western Publishing. They wanted us to draw 64 pages of a Donald Duck story. I suspect the reason we were chosen for this assignment was that it was a more story related project. We were doing all the Donald Duck stories for the shorts and doing all the story sketches at the time so I'm just guessing that they probably felt we could work out this story as well, maybe even add in a few touches to help it flow properly."