The utopian hopes that had inspired sixteenth-century English promoters of colonization such as Gilbert, Raleigh, and the Hakluyts dissipated quickly during the first century of English settlement in the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Instead of becoming havens for the English poor and unemployed, or models of interracial harmony, the southern colonies of the seventeenth century were weakened by disease, wracked by recurring conflicts with native Americans, and disrupted by profit-hungry planters' exploitation of both poor whites and blacks. Many of the tragedies of Spanish colonization in Central America and the Southwest and England's conquest of Ireland were repeated in the American South and the British Caribbean.