In 1620, an African woman named Angela arrived in Jamestown. Her Christian name indicates that Angela was baptized. Like Angela, most Africans brought to North America before 1660 came from West Central Africa. They spoke one of two closely related Bantu languages, Kikongo or Kimbundu. Many probably knew some Portuguese too. Most had been baptized, and many considered themselves Christian. xid-34324812_1 West Central African leaders often saw baptism as a tool of diplomacy. Here Nzinga Mbandi, sister and representative of King Ngola Mbandi of Ndongo, receives baptism during a visit to Angola's Portuguese governor that aimed to end the wars that decimated Ndongo and enslaved thousands of West Central Africans. Anglea had been captured during a Portuguese-Imbangala war against the Kingdom of Ndongo in Angola. She and about 350 others boarded the So Joo Bautista, one of the Portuguese-registered vessels that ferried the vast majority of Africans to the Americas until 1650. Nearly 700,000 enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic between 1600 and 1650. More than three-quarters of them departed West Central Africa as Angela did, but most West Central Africans who left between 1616 and 1625 were taken to Brazil or Central America (nine-tenths of all Africans brought to the New World landed in Brazil or the Caribbean islands). Angela's intended destination was Mexico. But two privateers, each commanded by an English captain, intercepted So Joo Bautista the in the Gulf of Mexico. The privateers seized Angela and over 50 others, divided them, and sailed for Virginia. The White Lion arrived first and sold 20 people in Jamestown. Until 1670, fewer than 5 percent of Virginians were Africans. Angela's background and experience matched those of the first Africans shipped to English and Dutch North America before 1660. Most came as a result of English or Dutch piracy on Spanish shippings (Portugal and Spain were united under Spanish rule between 1581 and 1640). English ships transported fewer than 2,000 Africans across the Atlantic in any decade until the 1640s, when sugar cultivation boomed on Barbados. For a century after Columbus's arrival, the traffic in slaves to the Americas had numbered a few thousand annually. But as sugar cultivation steadily prospered after 1600, slave imports rose to 19,000 a year during the seventeenth century (and mushroomed to 60,000 a year in the eighteenth century). No one bid on Angela, who landed in Virginia in February 1620. She became one of William Pierce's four "servants" and probably spent most of her time tending to livestock. Angela joined 32 African Virginians and about 900 other colonists. Among them were Antonio and Isabel, who by 1625 had their son William baptized. A generation later they were free and had become the Johnsons, the most prosperous African American family in English North America, one that owned slaves who grew tobacco. In 1667, their son John bought 44 acres and named the estate "Angola" to honor his parents' origins. About one-quarter of the Africans whose name appear in Virginia's public records between 1635 and 1650 had Iberian names such as Antonio, Manuel, or Maria. Before 1640, most lived and worked alongside at least five other Africans. We do not know when Angela died or if she ever became free. We do know that Angela and other Africans shared much in common that helped them to weather their bondage and sometimes escape it during the first decades of the Afro-Virginian history. In what ways did the struggle between England and Spain for supremacy in the Americas shape Angela's ordeal and English participation in the Atlantic slave trade? In what ways did shared origins in West Central Africa likely shape the lives of Angela and other Africans in early Virginia?