alternatehistory.com

The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624. edited by Peter Mancall, "Virginia's Other Prototype: The Caribbean," Philip Morgan, 2007, page 377:

https://books.google.com/books?id=I...icates the die was cast much earlier"&f=false

' . . . The Caribbean experience, with which many early Virginians were familiar, indicates the die was cast much earlier. In the 1560s, John Hawkins and associates mounted four slave-trading expeditions in which they brought about 1,300 African slaves into the Caribbean region. Seeing these Africans as legitimate prey, to be acquired by force (if necessary) and often sold with threat of force, the English viewed their human cargo as nothing other than "very good merchandize," as Richard Hakluyt put it. Hawkins's new coat of arms featured a black slave bound with a rope. His voyages were not especially successful [emphasis added], so thereafter English ship captains increasingly preyed on the slave ships of others and sold their captives to Spanish planters, or they raided plantations and then ransomed back the slaves to their owners. . . '

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Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader, Harry Kelsey, 2003.

Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630, Kenneth Andrews, 1984, pages 116-34.

Histoire Naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library, translated by Ruth Kraemer, 1996, fols. 47, 57, 98-98v, 100-100v, and pages 259, 261, 266-67.
Now, on straight up economic terms, four voyages with 1,300 persons bought or captured as slaves, sounds like it would have been successful. But this source is saying not so much.

And plus, it goes on to mention English captains preying on the slave ships of others, or raiding plantations and then ransoming the slaves back.

What if slavery in the Caribbean had stumbled economically?
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