Details from The Silver Treasure Hunt, a comic book produced for The Canadian Fishing Company Ltd to promote their Gold Seal line. A good friend of mine had the earlier printing of this comic, and I’ve been looking for my own copy ever since. I scanned it at high resolution here.
You can see the earlier edition of the comic here which contains 4 extra pages that explain how salmon are caught and canned in greater detail.
The characters in this comic book were developed by the Walt Disney Company, though this fact is not made clear in the comic book itself. This giveaway comic is one of two that were produced, (the other was called Pacific Rescue) and they both promoted the Gold Seal line of canned salmon and tuna in Canada. The comic is dated ca 1953-1955 online, but no date actually appears in the book.
The site goldseal.ca previously had a section on the history of the comic, but this is now only view-able at archive.org: “From 1943 through 1945 Canadian Fishing Company contracted with the Walt Disney Company to develop a series of cartoon characters to be used in advertisements. Characters such as ‘Sammy’ Gold Seal (aka 'Sammy’ Salmon), 'Wally’ Walrus, 'Percy’ Panda, 'Pete’ Pelican and 'Sneak’ Seagull were created by the Walt Disney Company.”
The comic book Pacific Rescue is described as follows: “The comic is based on an actual 1950 rescue of U.S. Airmen by a Canfisco fishing vessel.” At this point, I’d like to emphasize…if ANYONE ever finds Pacific Rescue,
please scan and post it! I’d really like to see the full story, it’s an
interesting Cold War West Coast piece of history!