Beattie gained international attention in 1984 for his investigation into the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin, which had left England in 1845 searching for the Northwest Passage.
His specialized knowledge of human skeletal biology and forensic anthropology has led Beattie to assist the RCMP and other agencies in criminal investigations and accidents, including the Hinton rail disaster in central Alberta.
[1][2] Following the success of the Franklin research, Beattie turned his attention to the only other Northwest Passage exploration to have ended in mass disaster with no survivors, the 1719 expedition of Capt.
[6] Beattie collaborated with writer John G. Geiger on a book about the researches, Frozen In Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, which became a best-seller in Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, and has been published in many other countries.
James Knight, which, like Franklin's, ended disastrously, with both ships lost and no survivors, on Marble Island, in the northwest part of Hudson Bay.