How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It informed me that the writer had sent to the police, and had Bartleby removed to the Tombs as a vagrant. (2.216)
The Tombs is a jail in Manhattan, so Bartleby has been carted off to prison. Bartleby doesn't really have any right or claim to the offices he was squatting in—but still, they were his home by default, and being sent to prison is being exiled from home. Or you could see it as just emphasizing the fact that he never had a home in the first place. Office-workers can spend more time at work than home; if you want to be all depressing about it, working is a kind of exile from home too.
Quote #2
…that the negresses used their utmost influence to have the deponent made away with…and before the engagement with the boats, as well as during the action, they sang melancholy songs to the negroes, and that this melancholy tone was more inflaming than a different one would have been, and was so intended… (3.410)
Why melancholy songs? Don Benito in his deposition says they sang melancholy songs to make the men fight more viciously. But maybe they're singing melancholy songs because they're far from home, and they realize that they're never going to get back. Don Benito's a racist; he can't see the black people as human, and therefore isn't able to realize that they're exiles, who have every reason to be sad.
Quote #3
Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites….(3.433)
Babo is killed, his body mutilated, and his head set out on a pike for strangers to gawk at. How do they bury people in his country? What prayers should be said over him? The whites don't care. He's murdered far from home, and dies an exile.
Quote #4
…concerning the tortoises found here, most mariners have long cherished a superstition, not more frightful than grotesque. They earnestly believe that all wicked sea-officers…are at death (and , in some cases, before death) transformed into tortoises; thenceforth dwelling upon these hot aridities… (5.15)
The turtles aren't exiles; the Galapagos is their home and they crawl about there happily. But precisely because they are happy turtles at home, they seem alien to the sailors from far away. So the sailors imagine that the most exiled an exile could be would be to be a turtle, at home in this strange place.
Quote #5
In the like deceptive vapors she at last struck upon a reef, whence ensued a long series of calamities too sad to detail. (5.56)
Melville is describing a ship that got lost along the coast of Peru and Chile. The tale of the exiled ship is so sad that Melville won't even tell it's story—he abandons the ship himself. It's not only exiled from its home, but from the story. It disappears into the fog, where neither rescuers nor readers can ever find it.
Quote #6
Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in Peru…watched every arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the Republic. (5.102)
This is about the ruler of Charles's Island, who was overthrown and forced to flee. It's a kind of parody of exile; like Bartleby in the lawyer's rooms, the island wasn't exactly the king's home. He just adopted it as his own, and then got forced out. Being kicked out of some place that isn't even yours to begin with lacks the nobility of a real king's exile. It's sort of pitiful and sad—and Melville is more poking fun at the exile here than sympathizing with it.
Quote #7
Sailors, deserting ships at other islands or in boats at sea anywhere in that vicinity, steered for Charles's Isle, as to their sure home of refuge… (5.102)
Here the Galapagos, place of exile, becomes a home. The sailors are going native, like turtles. Sometimes being a turtle is a good thing.
Quote #8
Contrary winds from out unstable skies, or contrary moods of his more varying mind, or shipwreck and sudden death in solitary waves; whatever was the cause, the blithe stranger never was seen again. (5.119)
This is referring to the ship that left Hunilla and her husband and brother on the island. Why the ship never came back, no one knows—part of exile is that you're out of place, and don't know what's happening far off, where you want to be. Exile here seems as much about knowledge as place.
Quote #9
The dogs ran howling along the water's marge: Now pausing to gaze at the flying boat, then motioning as if to leap in chase…. Had they been human beings, hardly would they have more vividly inspired the sense of desolation. (5.172)
Hunilla escapes from exile, but her dogs are left behind. The island is their home, so they're not exactly exiles—but it's one of those things where home is where the heart is, and their hearts are with Hunilla. Poor doggies.
Quote #10
Nor have there been wanting instances where the inhumanity of some captain has led them to wreak a secure revenge upon seamen who have given their caprice or pride some singular offense. Thrust ashore upon the scorching marl, such mariners are abandoned to perish outright, unless by solitary labors they succeed in discovering some precious driblets of moisture oozing from a rock or stagnant in a mountain pool. (5.210)
Captains sometimes maroon sailors on the islands. That's the iconic form of exile; trapped on a desert island. You don't get much more exiled than that.