[Fubarable]

On quick glance at your code, I see that you have methods with parameters that are never used.

For instance if you declare a method like so:

public void load(String pirateTxt) throws IOException {

Then you don't want to hard-code the file name within the method like so:

Scanner infile = new Scanner(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("pirate.txt")));

If you do this, why even bother giving the method a parameter. Instead, use the parameter:

Scanner infile = new Scanner(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(pirateTxt)));

Otherwise if you still have problems, you should do some debugging to find out more.