I recently read The Island at the Center of the World, about the history of New Amsterdam, but there's a gap in the chronology.
When the first ship with settlers arrives, Manhattan is still empty apart from some trading posts. The West-India Company assigns people places along the river, and then 'in the next two years, houses and huts were build'. What happened in those two years?
As the book describes it, these settlers were mostly refugees, city-dwellers or religious proselytizers. Not craftsmen. Did they sleep outside? Did they start with Walden-like houses: just a hole in the ground? But Thoreau still went home at night after working on his house by day, plus he used tools.
It seems crazy that half of them didn't die right there and then.
The important word here is "mostly" city-dwellers, etc. Among the first Walloon settlers of 1624 was also a sawyer, with his wife and eight children. The warship Zoutberg arrived soon after around 1626 ,with masons, carpenters etc. to rebuild the fort and construct other buildings.The "projectors" of early colonies were not completely clueless: along with the "saints", or religious refugees, forming the Plymouth colony, for example, were also various "strangers" ( like cooper John Alden), who were not Brownists but had useful trades and were convinced to join on. But the early colonies were not built with excellent planning, adequate supplies, and surplus manpower: they were all very hard-scrabble , improvised, badly-funded affairs, attracting too many misfits who were unable to fend for themselves or who worked badly with others. New Netherlands in 1630 still had very minimal housing- a palisade wall, a fort made with sod walls, stone warehouse, 30 houses made "of the bark of trees", some people living in dug outs, "cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep".
Bernard Bailyn: The Barbarous Years