Berbice

Berbice was the Dutch river colony of Guiana, planted in 1627 by the Vlissingen merchant Abraham van Peere under the West India Company and kept as his family's personal fief until 1714. Its capital stood at Fort Nassau for a century and a half while plantations worked the river, the family owning every one but for sugar men on the Canje, repelling an English attack in 1665, ransomed from French Cassard's 1712 occupation after quarrels with the Second Dutch West India Company, and the Society of Berbice, sister to Suriname's, governed the later years like a chartered company-state. In 1790 the seat moved downriver to New Amsterdam, grown around Fort Sint Andries into the new capital, and the flags changed bewilderingly fast after that: Dutch state colony from 1792, British prize in 1815, and in 1831 merger with Demerara-Essequibo into British Guiana, a county till 1958 and independent Guyana in 1966.