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Your ship takes another two days to reach the shore, but you find the area perfect for founding a colony: there are abundant fish in the water and game on the land, with no sign of the Native Americans. You are swift to put all of your colonists and soldiers onto the continent, leaving the ship with only it's sailors aboard.

The big question now is this: do you spend a few years in temporary shelters preparing the colony site for occupation or do you found the settlement right away?

The first approach is one of those "short-term loss, long-term gain" type of things, the plowed ground for founding the colony will make your settlement grow far faster and be much more profitable than forested lowlands, but founding a colony immediately will give you a leg up in the early race to colonize the new world and put you a cut above the other European powers in terms of exploration and import/export...