Henry Morton Stanley

You know: the guy who went hunting for Livingstone and, when he found him, said, "Dr Livingstone, I presume."

From Stanley was more hero than colonialist brute:

Critics who have condemned a planned statue of Henry Morton Stanley are misguided, says Tim Butcher.

His 1874-77 journey, charting the Congo river, started the Scramble for Africa. Before Stanley, the white man had been largely content to nibble at the edges, staking little more than ports such as Freetown, Cape Town and Mombasa. After Stanley, the white man went inland.
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What makes Stanley a special case? After his first Congo journey it is true that he did return as the colonial agent for the Belgian king, Leopold II. What Leopold then got up to in the Congo was at the darker end of the spectrum of colonial cruelty – his agents hacked hands off natives pour encourager les autres to drive up harvesting of natural rubber, and they armed tribe against tribe. It was this horror that Joseph Conrad saw in 1890 when he skippered a boat down the Congo, something that burnt in his soul for nine years before it spilled so memorably onto the pages of his novel Heart of Darkness.

But in all this, Stanley's role was that of sorcerer's apprentice. He might have created something that went on to do awful things, but that happened years after he left. Perhaps he deserves opprobrium for hoodwinking chiefs into ceding sovereignty. If that is the standard, then just about every early American president should be pilloried for conning native Americans out of their land.

Welsh explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley with his adopted son Kalulu: